Milady de Winter from The Three Musketeers
I must start this entry with a confession: I have never read Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers in its entirety – though I am aware that his Milady de Winter is a much darker character than how she’s portrayed in more modern takes on the source material. In fact, I was rather shocked to read the Wikipedia page on her character and realize just how softened she’s become across various film and television adaptations – while still remaining an assassin-for-hire for a corrupt cardinal, of course.
In the book, her worst crime is murdering Constance in cold blood, largely out of spite. Although many adaptations like to depict her love affair with Athos as a romantic tragedy (as well as the impetus for her malice after he turns on her when her history is discovered) the book makes it more of an opportunistic match to advance her fortunes. And it can be very disconcerting to learn that she’s ultimately beheaded without trial by our “heroes” in the original text.
It’s no wonder that adaptations go a little easier on Milady, as it’s difficult to justify her treatment in the novel – Athos discovers a convict brand on her shoulder while they’re out riding one day and promptly hangs her from a tree. Dude! No trial? No opportunity to explain herself? No benefit of the doubt? To your own wife?? No wonder she hates him! Unsurprisingly, modern adaptations try to moderate all this with some tweaks to her backstory: the 2023 films show us the convict brand was administered at the hands of her abusive first husband, while the 2014 series has her claim she killed her brother-in-law in self-defense after he assaulted her.
Plenty of other films and shows have also alleviated her fate, whether it’s letting her survive the film (2011) or allowing her to take her own way out (1993). I’ve no complaints – think of all the male villains, from Dracula to Judas to Loki to Hannibal Lector, who have been humanized across the decades. It’s nice that we’re capable of doing the same thing to a villainess.
Though of course, the reason why Milady is spared in so many adaptations is obvious: in any kind of franchise that has its eye on sequels or multiple seasons, why would you do away with a character who is as much fun as Milady de Winter? She’s a master of disguise, an expert manipulator, a cunning thief, a crack-shot… you can’t just have her executed halfway through the story! She has to be kept around to cause more trouble and torture Athos in a rare example of a bad girl/good man pairing.
(Likewise, adaptations can’t resist leaning into the portrayal of a genuine love affair between Athos and Milady, for who could resist the glorious toxicity of two messed-up people who tried to destroy one another, only to discover that the other still lives? It’s a dynamic infused with the potential for all sorts of drama, though like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, they can never be fully reconciled in front of the audience. If it ever happens, it must occur off-screen, in secret, and out of sight).
Milady de Winter is also one of pop-culture’s quintessential Femme Fatales. The debate over whether a woman using her feminine wiles to get what she wants is to be condemned as anti-feminist or celebrated as sexual empowerment continues to this day, but it can’t be denied that it’s a lot of fun to watch. Milady is a classic example of the archetype, charming and seducing her way across France – though of course, there’s a downside. Whenever power and unbridled sexuality are mingled in a female character, there’s bound to be at least some subtextual commentary on mankind’s fear of both those things existing in a woman.
In that sense, Milady reminds me of so many other wronged women who are also highly sexualized: Lilith, Morgan le Fey, Medea of Colchis, Isabella from the BBC’s Robin Hood – women who end up committing terrible crimes as retribution for how they’ve been treated. Men may be afraid of her, but I’m sure more than a few women are silently egging her on, as the moral of the story shouldn’t be to beware of her, but to not push her into villainy through cruelty and neglect in the first place!
As befits a mutable figure, who at times can appear vicious and cruel, at others pitiable and ambiguous, Milady has been played by dozens of different actresses across the years: Barbara La Marr, Dorothy Revier, Margot Grahame, Binnie Barnes, Lana Turner, Mylène Demongeot, Faye Dunaway, Rebecca De Mornay, Emmanuelle Béart, Milla Jovovich, Ekaterina Vilkova, Maimie McCoy and Eva Green to name a few.
In the hands of these performers, Milady slinks in and out of the shadows until the next adaptation comes along – to evade execution, to be avenged by her son, to find new outlets for her range of talents, to defy her book fate and survive whatever’s thrown at her. She’s an amorphous figure that’s impossible to pin down – even the original text contains several inconsistencies in her backstory and never even definitively decides on her real name.
Milady’s true self is unknown to all.
