Evil Queen
The Queen is a fictional character in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the Disney animated film based on it. The Queen was often referred to as "Queen Grimhilde" in Disney publications of the 1930s. Her appearance was inspired by the Helen Gahagan character in the film She (1935). She was voiced by Lucille LaVerne.
The Queen is extremely beautiful, but very vain. She seduced and married a widowed king, who had a daughter called Snow White with his first wife. After the king died, the Queen sent Snow White to work in her castle and forced her stepdaughter to abandon her title as Princess, similar to the situation of Cinderella.
The Queen ranks #10 in the American Film Institute's list of the 50 Best Movie Villains of All Time.
Brothers Grimm version
The original Brothers Grimm fairy tale is mostly the same as the Disney one, with a few differences.
- In the first edition, though not the subsequent ones, the Queen was Snow White's mother, not stepmother.
- The Queen did not use a potion to change herself into a witch, but instead dressed in a disguse of an old woman.
- She tried three times to kill Snow White: once with a boned corset to crush her ribs, once with a poisoned brush/comb, and finally with a poisoned apple.
Also, although the Queen did not die right after giving Snow White the poisoned apple, she was killed eventually. After Snow White and the Prince revealed her true nature, she was invited to their wedding, where she was forced to wear red-hot iron shoes and "dance until she dropped down dead."
Disney version
The Queen possessed dark powers and knowledge, including the ability to summon wind and lightning, and a magical mirror with which she could look upon whatever she wished. The Magic Mirror showed a haunted, smoky face which replied to the Queen's requests. She regularly asked the Mirror who was the fairest in the land ("Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?"), and the Mirror always replied that she was.
However, one day, the Mirror told her that there was a new fairest woman in the land, her stepdaughter, Snow White. After observing the handsome Prince singing a love song to Snow White, the Queen, in a jealous rage, ordered her huntsman Humbert to take the Princess deep into the forest and kill her. He was ordered to bring back her heart to prove that he had done so.
Humbert could not bear to kill the young princess, so he tells her to run away and never to return. In order to escape the penalty, he returned with a pig's heart and gave it to the Queen. When she questioned her Mirror, it again replied that Snow White was the fairest in the land, and that she was living at the cottage of the seven dwarfs. It is unknown whether the Queen sends Humbert to his death or he escapes.
Chagrined and furious, the Queen goes down into the dungeon laboratory and mixes a potion that turns her into a hag, an old peddler woman. Her beauty is shrouded in ugliness; a true image of twisted evil. It is quite ironic that she, so obsessed with her own beauty, is willing to forsake it to destroy competition to it. It wrinkles her skin into that of an old lady and lengthens her nails into claws. This appearance of the Queen is commonly referred to as The Witch. She then conjures a poison apple which holds death-like sleep inside it, and proceeds to leave the castle. She is sure that no one would know or perform the counter-curse to her spell, and believes the dwarfs would bury Snow White alive, believing she was dead.
The Queen comes to the cottage, followed by two vicious vultures, and finds Snow White baking a pie for Grumpy the dwarf. Somehow, Snow White's animal friends realize that the old hag is the Queen. After an unsuccessful attempt to warn Snow White by attacking the Queen, they go to warn the dwarfs of the Queen's arrival.
The Queen tricks Snow White into letting her inside the cottage and eating the poisoned apple, telling her that it is a magic wishing apple. Snow White takes a bite and falls to the floor, apparently dead. The Queen rejoices in her victory, but is soon discovered by the Seven Dwarves, who chase her deep into the forest as a great storm started. She climbs up into the mountains, where she stands upon a precipice and attempts to push a large boulder onto the dwarfs with a large stick. All of a sudden, a flash of lightning strikes between her and the boulder, destroying the precipice. The Queen plummets into the dark chasm, and the boulder falls back, smashing her. As the dwarfs looked wide-eyed over the cliff's edge, the vultures fly past, apparently to devour her corpse.
A Tale Of Terror version
The film Snow White: A Tale of Terror was an attempt to make a more "realistic" story. There the character is not a Queen, but rather a noblewoman named Lady Claudia played by Sigourney Weaver. Also, while portrayed as a tragic character, she is a far more malignant character than in any other version.
She starts out by marrying widower and devout Christian, Frederick Hoffman, a man whom she dearly loves. She also seeks to befriends his daughter, now her stepdaughter. They at first get along well and are happy together--she giver her a puppy and plays with the girl's caterpillar friends--but Lilliana Hoffman ("Snow White") grows suspicious. That suspicion is vindicated when she sees her grandmother die in agony after seeing a mirror that had belonged to Lady Claudia's mother. From that, her comments about casting the runes early on, her mentioning that "they" hate her and her mother's kind, and that Snow White is a German fairy tale she might be a holdout of Germanic paganism hiding in a Christian world.
All through the early years of her relationship with Lilliana she tries to be loving and kind to her but years of disrespect on Lilliana's part sour whatever relationship they could have had. For example, when the people of the manor bless Lord and Lady Hoffman's marriage bed so that their consummation might be fruitful, Lilliana throws the holy water at Claudia's face. By the ninth year of her marriage to Lord Hoffman she is pregnant with a son and she is very content but this changes during a dance. She had offered her stepdaughter the dress she had worn as a maiden but the daughter refuses. When she arrives at the dance, she wears her birth mother's dress and dances with her father. With Frederick Hoffman, and all the others, turn away from his wife for his daughter--and his first wife's memory--the enraged and jealous Lady Claudia suffers such a severe rush of stress that she collapses and goes into labor. The baby is still born.
Driven mad by grief and finding herself disshiveled she sees her beautiful and idealized self in her mirror. The mirror--or herself in her madness--blames Lilliana for the baby's death and with that Claudia plots her death. At first she seems to want peace with her stepdaughter, feeling some guilt over the baby's death but when Lilliana is in the forest, Claudia's incestual and mute brother goes to kill her. When she escapes (and not out of any mercy on the brother's part) the brother kills a pig and gives his sister the organs of proof of the deed. Lady Claudia serves part of the organs as a stew which she eats with sexual, cannibalistic relish. She also dances as she smears herself with the rest of the bloody organs. When her mirror tells her that her stepdaugher is alive, she uses her black magic to murder her brother--forced suicide.
On learning Lilliana's whereabouts by means of her ravens, Lady Claudia tries to kill her and the seven miners with whom she hides by means of her witchcraft. (There were no dwarves; there are instead rude miners.) She first buries a bird in the falling sand of an hourglass to cause a cave-in at the miners' mine. She fails to kill Lilliana but succeeds at killing a miner. Later she pushes over and breaks her Christian husband's statues of the Saints to make the trees in the miner's forest home fall over and hopefully break her stepdaughter. She fails and instead kills more miners. She then takes the mirror's advice; that advice being to kill her stepdaughter with the Serpent's fruit--the apple. Using magic to turn herself into a hag, Lady Claudia poisons Lilliana, placing her in a coma.
With Lilliana thought dead, Lady Claudia turns her attention inward, trying to seduce Lilliana's fiancee--Peter Gutenburg--and raping her husband as a prelude to human sacrifice in an attempt to revive her dead baby. The actual ritual itself is performed inside the manor chapel, Lady Claudia bringing her sacrificial victim before the image of the crucified Jesus Christ in order to profane Christian soil. She also bewitches every last servant of the manor house, turning them into her monsters. (The same goes for the dog she gave her stepdaughter as a child.) When her stepdaughter at last is healed, she, Gutenburg, and Will, the chief miner, confront Lady Claudia. Peter is killed and Lilliana finds her father crucified upside down opposite the figure of Jesus on a life sized crucifix now hanging upside down by a chain from the manor chapel's ceiling. (Looking at the image of Christ, the madwoman told Him she would give Him company.)
After seeing this, Lilliana confronts her stepmother and ultimately kills her by stabbing her image in the mirror--stabbing the image in the mirror through the heart makes Lady Claudia's chest spurt blood. A fire ensues and Lady Claudia writhes in agony as she is burned alive, dancing in red hot shoes until she drops dead.
Queen of Fables
The Queen of Fables is a witch from DC comic books. She was a scheming villainess who in her youth wrought Hell on Earth until she was trapped in a book by her own stepdaughter, Snow White. Centuries later, she was freed accidentally by Snow White's descendants and has since faced many Justice League superheroes like Superman and Wonder Woman whom she thought was Snow White due to her great beauty.
Christine Slevil-Lewis-White
In The 10th Kingdom the main villain is Christine Slevil-Lewis-White. After the events in the story of Snow White, the Evil Queen was left broken and crippled and she contacted Christine Slevil Lewis, a jealous, adulterous madwoman from our world. Slevil Lewis was contacted after almost killing her daughter in a fit of madness. She was then taken to the realm of the Nine Kingdoms and was trained by the all but dead Evil Queen to be her successor and the means by which she would have revenge. Now the new Evil Queen, Slevil Lewis wrought forth a reign of terror allying with the trolls, using mass poisoning through apples, and attempting to assassinate Prince Wendell White, grandson of Show White and heir apparent. With the corpse/ghost of the first Evil Queen goading her, the second Evil Queen was ultimately jailed though she escaped before being killed by her daughter.
Trivia
- In Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, actress Monica Bellucci plays an evil character with many similarities to the Queen. For example, she is extremely vain (obsessed with preserving her youthful beauty and being the fairest in all the land) and has a gigantic mirror in her chamber.
- In "Mirror Mirror", by Gregory Maguire, the Queen and Witch are portrayed as Lucrezia Borgia.
- Disney's version of the Queen is still one of the most popular movie villains to date. She would go on to make frequent appearances in Disney comics, where, under the alias The Witch, she regularly antagonized Disney characters like Li'l Bad Wolf, Chip 'n Dale, and Tinkerbell. {In one comic story she tries to get rich by turning Pinocchio into gold and tricks two of Donald Duck's nephews into becoming apples-in the end she is temporarily turned into gold herself and our heroes are restored to normal}. There was even an Italian story explaining how she had survived her apparent death in the movie, and why she couldn't change back to her normal self.
- A Brazilian story named O Feitiço Virou Contra a Feiticeira featuring Magica De Spell shows Magica trying to use The Witch's apples to put Scrooge McDuck and everyone else in the Money Bin to sleep so she could easily steal the Number One Dime. The apples were left at the bin's door, but Scrooge decided to sell the apples rather than eating them. Searching for consolation after defeat, Magica visits Mad Madam Mim and they eat a pie. They both go to sleep after she tells Magica she made the pie with apples bought from Scrooge's nephews.
- In a portion of the Disney film that was never completed, the Evil Queen was to have captured the Prince who wakes Snow White. In this scene, she was also to have made the skeletons in the dungeon dance in order to frighten him. This would later inspire the dungeon scene in Sleeping Beauty when Maleficent mocks Prince Philip.
- In both versions of the nighttime show Fantasmic in Disneyland, the Queen plans to get rid of Mickey Mouse by changing his dream into a "nightmare Fantasmic." She mixes a spell and becomes the Witch in a similar way to the movie. She calls on a host of other villains, including Ursula, Cruella de Vil, Scar, Judge Claude Frollo, Jafar, Hades, Chernabog, and Maleficent. Eventually, Mickey destroys all the villains and the Queen is the last to be destroyed before Malifecent completely dies.
- The Evil Queen also appears at the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts as a meetable character.
- The Evil Queen is featured as a voice in Walt Disney World's Happy Hallowshes holiday fireworks show, along with Ursula, Jafar and Oogie Boogie.
- The evil queen was featured in the Disney Interactive game, Villains' Revenge as one of the four primary villains who had altered the endings of their stories. She put the seven dwarves and Snow White to sleep and change the Dwarves' cottage into a giant apple-like house. The player had to mix potions to free the prince so the story could be complete. The queen returned again and battled the player, firing magical spells. After losing to the player, she retreats into her house where she realises how ugly she is in her disguise and perishes, breaking her magic mirror.
- Walt Disney described the Queen as "a combination of Lady Macbeth and the Big Bad Wolf."
- Except for a silhouette which shows her as the hag on the Snow White podium, The Queen is one of the few major Disney villains that do not appear in the Kingdom Hearts series in person. Other major villains that do not appear in the series whatsoever include Cruella de Vil, Lady Tremaine, Gaston, Frollo, Yzma, Gantu, Shere Khan and Kaa.
- She was featured in House of Mouse and Mickey's House of Villains.
- She appears in Shrek the Third as part of Prince Charming's villain army.