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Few fairy tale characters have as fitting and self-explanatory names as Snow White. The story of a young maiden who incurs the ire and envy of a queen who hopes to be—and remain—the fairest of them all hinges on the very purity of its central character. Her purity is as much about her outward appearance (her skin as white as snow, her lips as red as blood) as the very innocence such physical features are meant to denote. Since it was first written down by the Brothers Grimm in the early 19th century, the details of Snow White’s plight have been toyed with and tweaked whenever the fanciful fairy tale has been adapted to the screen. But, along with her apt name, one thing has remained consistent with every new iteration: her foil. There is, after all, no Snow White tale without an aging, vain queen grasping for youth and beauty with increased desperation.

As Gal Gadot slips into that role for Disney’s live-action adaptation of its very first animated feature, looking at how filmmakers and actresses alike have tackled this vision of an “Evil Queen” offers a fascinating portrait of what this fairy tale has stood for over a century of film adaptations. It also, more pointedly, showcases how this villainess has evolved as a repository for fears and anxieties about age and beauty best explored by, as of late, cinema’s most arresting actresses “of a certain age.” From Charlize Theron and Isabelle Huppert to Maribel Verdú and Sigourney Weaver, these actresses have both embodied and pushed back against what it means to age into this kind of role, a villain who’s only beco*e more tragic and co*plex over the decades.

Lucille La Verne, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937)

The most well-known version of this Brothers Grimm tale is not all that grim. Under Walt Disney, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs made the story of an Evil Queen eager to kill off her lily-white stepdaughter (and ask for her bloodied heart, no less) into a colorful instant classic, fit for the entire family. It helped that it had a few hummable ditties and gorgeous animation to match. Yet it’s still a simple fairy tale, its central characters beholden to rigid archetypes. Snow White was little else but a kindhearted girl whose affable demeanor irked her stepmother and endeared her to an adoring Prince. Meanwhile, the Evil Queen, whose striking visage was originally inspired by the theatrical masks designed by Władysław T. Benda, was a full-on villainess (a mixture of Lady Macbeth and Big Bad Wolf, as early scripts suggested). With Lucille La Verne’s icy voice performance, which matched the Queen’s stoic stillness, Disney created a character whose mercurial powers sprung solely from her crippling vanity. The actress, who was in her sixties when she recorded the voice for the film (opposite Adriana Caselotti, who was in her late teens when she recorded the part of Snow White), brought a gravitas to the character, establishing a kind of calcified beauty and elegance that were a welco*e contrast to the youthful ways of the film’s animated heroine.

Patricia Medina, Snow White And The Three Stooges (1961)

This “20th Century-Fox CinemaScope DeLuxe Color fairy tale extravaganza” (as its own publicity pressbook dubbed it) is, both on paper and on the screen, an odd offering. This is a Three Stooges film that tried to echo the appeal and aesthetic of The Wizard Of Oz, all while boasting musical sequences and ice skating numbers (some featuring Olympic skater Carol Heiss in the title role) in the service of a well-worn tale everyone knew and loved. Some bits clearly worked better than others; it is well understood that this critical and box office flop was nowhere near the very best Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe had to offer; nor could it live up to that other Noel Langley-penned Technicolor adaptation. But what Snow White And The Three Stooges did have was a stellar Evil Queen, played with gusto by 1940s B-movie beauty Patricia Medina, whose own career decline toward the end of the 1950s felt like a perfect meta-meditation on her character’s ambition to prevent her kingdom from being taken over by her affable stepdaughter. Clad in colorful, regal, medieval-inspired dresses, a crown atop her head (and later still flying atop a broom) as she plots and schemes against Snow White and the Prince, Medina may well have been asked to play the Wicked Witch Of The West. But in so doing she offered a more mischievous take on this character than Disney had once done, and proved how easily it could be developed into a craven figure of female ambition gone awry.

Diana Rigg, Snow White (1987)

One need not look further than 1987’s Cannon Films direct-to-video take on Snow White to see exactly how the Evil Queen was being reframed in the late 20th century. The fairy tale remains the same (for the most part), but in this musical version—in a song titled “More Beautiful Than Me,” no less—The Avengers star and Bond Girl Diana Rigg fleshes out her character’s motivations and ambitions. For starters, being the fairest of them all doesn’t co*e down to mere beauty. As she sings, “For one, there’s the way I do my hair, and the way I do my makeup with such care, with the gowns I pick and my furs so thick.” This is three-dimensional vanity that goes beyond grasping for youth—it is about realizing that style and elegance may well not be enough to fend off either the passing of time or the encroaching threat of Snow White’s graceful visage. And, as future adaptations would co*e to deploy, casting someone of Rigg’s stature (an Emmy- and Tony-nominated actress whom audiences had first seen as a young star decades before), helped give the Evil Queen an undeniable gravitas and meta-narrative. Here was an aged beauty still able to co*mand the screen and go toe to toe with the young and already typecast Sarah Patterson, who’d first nabbed international attention in the gothic-horror fairy tale The co*pany Of Wolves a few years prior.

Sigourney Weaver, Snow White: A Tale Of Terror (1997)

With a subtitle as blunt as “A Tale Of Terror,” it’s no surprise that this 1997 adaptation goes for such a dark, horrifying aesthetic. A Showtime production clearly aimed at cable-watching adults (this wasn’t your grandmother’s Snow White!), Michael Cohn’s gothic reinterpretation rightly focused on Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Claudia Hoffman. An actress best known for playing one of the biggest badass action heroines of the 1980s—not to mention a conniving boss in Working Girl and a seductive, terrifying presence in Ghostbusters—Weaver brought an edge to her Evil Queen character that almost made her into a tragic figure. Lilliana (Monica Keena’s Snow White character) is cruel and self-centered, while Claudia is driven to villainy when she loses her firstborn during childbirth and decides she must punish her stepdaughter for her affronts. There’s real desperation in Weaver’s performance, driven not by sheer vanity or envy, but by tragedy. It consumes Claudia, and drives her to terrorize young Lilliana. A much more psychologically co*plex reimagining than what had co*e before, this bloodied horror take on Snow White was helped in no small part by Weaver’s delicious and wounded take on its Evil Queen—one which earned her her first Emmy nomination. 

Miranda Richardson, Snow White: The Fairest Of Them All (2001)

If there’s one thing that characterized these late 20th- and early 21st-century Snow White adaptations, it was an embrace of the darker, gothic undertones of the original fairy tale. With that came an understanding that it was the villainess whose story had more grandeur and excitement than that of Snow White. You don’t cast the likes of Miranda Richardson if you’re not going to give the legendary British actress a role she can sink her teeth into. As was beco*ing de rigueur, Kristin Kreuk’s titular figure couldn’t help but co*e off as bland in contrast to Richardson’s theatrics. Richardson got to play an ugly woman who gets transformed into a beautiful one through magic, and who begrudges her stepdaughter’s natural beauty in return. During the mirror scene which every iteration of the story has played with, the BAFTA-winning actress conveyed that her Queen Elspeth was the kind of woman who’d relish hearing that she’s the fairest of them all so deeply that it was almost intoxicating. Her laughter emphasized that her vanity was now a kind of inside joke she shared with mirror and audience alike. Even as a Hallmark production, Snow White: The Fairest Of Them All was anchored by Richardson’s seductive take on the Evil Queen (who aggressively flirts with the handsome prince and throws her magic mirror like a powerful boomerang), which found as much tragedy in Elspeth’s plight as in that of Snow White.

Julia Roberts, Mirror Mirror (2012)

It’s not often you get not one, not two, but three Snow White adaptations in a single calendar year. But that is exactly what happened in 2012. Thankfully, each version was so distinct from the others that it never felt like they were treading the same ground. For his wild take on the material, filmmaker Tarsem Singh recruited a pre-Emily In Paris Lily Collins for the central role and a pre-Call Me By Your Name Armie Hammer for the role of the hapless yet handsome prince. But it was his casting of Julia Roberts as the Evil Queen that helped set the tone for what this outrageously zany co*edy would do with the Brothers Grimm tale. co*pared to what had co*e before, Roberts’ lighthearted but biting—not to mention flirty—take on the Evil Queen proved once more that it was the villainess who got to have all the fun. Showcasing Eiko Ishioka’s gloriously over-the-top costumes, and winking at the kind of conniving characters that America’s Sweetheart was so rarely allowed to play during her heyday, Mirror Mirror offered an Evil Queen with a sense of humor, one whose villainy was borderline charming. Even as she stands for a kind of “let them eat cake” leader (yes, she throws a ball as she raises taxes), Roberts’ Evil Queen could almost get you to root for her.

Charlize Theron, Snow White And The Huntsman (2012)

If Julia Roberts’ megawatt smile and million-dollar laugh helped Singh turn Snow White into an absurdist co*edy of errors, Rupert Sanders’ choice for Ravenna, his Evil Queen, helped set the tone for this dark and gritty action-adventure film. Charlize Theron still feels like a perfect vision for a modern adaptation of Snow White: Her statuesque figure and imposing screen presence—not to mention her striking beauty—feel of a piece with a character who, in this version, is a powerful sorceress who sucks the youth from the kingdom’s young women. Like so many modern adaptations, her queen co*es armed with a tragic backstory which drives both her vanity and her bitterness. Then again, that all plays second fiddle to Colleen Atwood’s amazing costumes, which make her look ever the gothic nature witch. This may be the most egregious modern take on Snow White, given that it tries to turn the title figure into an action star (almost in spite of Kristen Stewart’s performance) and her story into the kind of CGI-driven dreck that had been encouraged in a post-Hunger Games/Alice In Wonderland era. Beauty is no longer her weakness or the thing that gives her anxiety. Instead, she intones, “Beauty is my power.” No wonder her Snow White is so much more affecting as a tableau than a character. At least Theron could make a venomous quip sound divine.

Maribel Verdú, Blancanieves (2012)

If Singh went for bright co*edy and Sanders for dour adventure, Robot Dreams’ Pablo Berger twisted the fairy tale by anchoring it in a decidedly Spanish milieu. Shot in black and white as a silent film, with requisite intertitles, and owing nods to both bullfighting and flamenco dance, this affecting adaptation played up the melodramatic antics of its central narrative. What is the rift between a stepmother and her young stepdaughter if not a family melodrama in the making? At once archly dramatic and playfully lighthearted, Blancanieves plays like a tragic fable wherein Maribel Verdú’s Encarna—equally stylish, kinky, and histrionic—is the one who drives the narrative and who, in this version, even triumphs over her stepdaughter. Berger’s end for Encarna may be gruesome (yes, a bull is involved) but this version ends with a tear running down the face of a still sleeping Carmen (Macarena García), who may never wake up from her apple-induced co*a and who may be relegated to being a circus attraction in her glass coffin. It’s fitting that Verdú won a Goya Award for her performance, which found textures in this most dastardly of villains. Verdú, best known in the U.S. for her roles in Y Tu Mamá También and Pan’s Labyrinth, is transfixing, having created a co*plex, erotically charged character. She aimed to curtail the beauty that the younger Carmen embodied, which contrasted against Encarna’s own highly stylized ideals of fiery femininity—this in itself a fascinating twist on this well-worn tale.

Isabelle Huppert, White As Snow (2019)

It makes sense that a 21st-century French adaptation of this enduring tale would double as a se*ual co*ing-of-age romp. It cast Isabelle Huppert as Maud, a woman who cannot fathom her lover flirting with her stepdaughter and who does, of course, the only thing one must do in such a situation: have her stepdaughter kidnapped and killed. Alas, that plan is foiled and allows young Claire (Lou de Laage) to begin a series of se*ual misadventures in the countryside (there are no dwarves here, only horny French men in a small town). As in so many of the previous iterations of the Evil Queen, Huppert’s screen persona (her Oscar-nominated Elle performance from three years prior sums it nicely) cannot help but color Maud, who loves to put on bright red lipstick and vape as she drives her convertible around with the top down. Huppert is an imperious presence, a natural fit for filmmaker Anne Fontaine’s feminist, modern retelling. Even as the film focuses on Claire and her se*ual awakening, her story could never be disentangled from the one sketched out by Huppert’s Maud. Snow White’s story beco*es an erotic thriller where the Evil Queen is as beguiled as she is threatened by her stepdaughter (most notably in a sequence where the two drunkenly dance together). Theirs is a rivalry both about what it means to be beautiful but also, crucially, about what it means to deploy one’s feminine wiles. And, like in Blancanieves, Fontaine’s film aims for a decidedly ambiguous ending, where any kind of happily ever after is left up for interpretation. As seen in these latter adaptations, the Evil Queen has morphed from a two-dimensional caricature (quite literally, in Disney’s hands) into a woman vital to the story. Snow White may still get first billing, but it’s the Evil Queen—and the seasoned actresses who play her—which proves to be the main attraction.