Annie Wilkes

Anne Marie Wilkes Dugan, usually known as Annie Wilkes, is a character in the 1987 novel Misery, by Stephen King. In the 1990 film adaptation of the novel, Annie Wilkes was portrayed by Kathy Bates, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal. The American Film Institute included Annie Wilkes (as played by Bates) in their "100 Heroes and Villains" list, ranking her as the 17th most iconic villain (and sixth most iconic villainess) in film history. A nurse by training, she has become one of the stereotypes of the nurse as a torturer and angel of death.

Character background

The novel provides Wilkes' backstory, stating that she was born in Bakersfield, California on April 1, 1943 and graduated from the University of Southern California's nursing school in 1966. After several years of working in hospitals across the country, she settled in a remote portion of Colorado's Western Slope.

Wilkes rescues Paul Sheldon after he breaks both of his legs in a car accident, and takes him to her home to convalesce. She fawns over Sheldon, a writer of romance novels starring her favorite literary character, Misery Chastain; she professes to be his "number one fan" and says that she loves him. She also implies that she has visited the hotel where Sheldon finishes his novels as he was staying there. These statements, and the fact that she is not in a hurry to take him to a hospital, make Sheldon uneasy. Sheldon has studied psychological disorders as part of his research for the Misery series, and suspects early on that Wilkes is mentally unstable.