18 Then And Now Photos Showing How Popular Female Film Characters Changed

Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor is seen throughout much of the Terminator series. And though the likes of Emilia Clarke and Lena Headey have also played the same role in some of the entries of the franchise, Hamilton has ultimately remained the face of Sarah Connor, starting from the original movie in 1984 up until the sequel Terminator: Dark Fate in 2019.

Technically speaking, the first live-action appearance of Wonder Woman was the 5-minute-long 1967 TV pilot short film titled Wonder Woman: Who's Afraid of Diana Prince? starring Ellie Wood Walker. Then there was the 1974 full-length live-action movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby. Neither of the two were deemed comic-book-accurate, leading to a bad reception by the public.

However, then came the 1975–1979 Wonder Woman TV series starring Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, who many of us remember fondly as the face of the iconic superwoman.

Today, the most recent incarnation of Wonder Woman is Gal Gadot, having starred in the 2020 movie titled Wonder Woman 1984. However, there’s a 2021 movie already complete—Justice Society: World War II—where the role of Wonder Woman is played by Stana Katic, but Gal Gadot is set to appear in three other movies in the next 3 years, one of which is currently complete, so it’s quite likely that she’ll keep the title of Wonder Woman for now.

Mary Poppins is probably the world’s most famous nanny, right there with Mrs. Doubtfire and Vin Diesel in that one movie.

Anyway, the first Mary Poppins movie (musical, in fact) was released in 1964 and it took the world by storm. This Walt Disney classic is based on P. L. Travers's book series of the same name.

Now, there are only two movies out there, but there have been loads of plays and musicals based on it as well. So, the 1964 iteration, starring Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins, was the only movie out there for quite a while until 2018, when Disney released an official sequel titled Mary Poppins Returns. There was a plan to reprise Andrews in this movie as well, but it didn’t work out, so Emily Blunt took on the role.

Also, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Halloween is one of the most iconic horror movie franchises in film history, right there alongside its ‘little brother’ Friday The 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, and Hellraiser.

But, did you know that ever since the first movie in 1978, Jamie Lee Curtis has always played the film’s protagonist Laurie Strode? With the exception of 2007’s Halloween, which is dubbed Rob Zombie’s Halloween where Laurie is played by Scout Taylor-Compton, she has been and continues to be Laurie Strode right up until the recently announced Halloween Ends due 2022.

Michael Myers, on the other hand, had different stunt doubles, different young and adult actors, and even different actors play him depending whether he’s masked or not.

Also known as Joan of Arc, the historical female figure has been imagined and reimagined on the screen multiple times by multiple actresses throughout the years.

Jeanne d'Arc films have been gracing the world as early as 1898 with the release of the short film Execution of Joan of Arc, where it’s unknown who played the role of Jeanne, followed by another short film, Joan of Arc from 1900, where she’s played by French film actress Jehanne D'Alcy. Others, like Maria Falconetti (1928), Ingrid Bergman (1948), and Milla Jovovich (1999) have also taken on the role, with the most recent being Lise Leplat Prudhomme in 2019’s Joan of Arc. Yeah, she does look super young, but remember that Jeanne herself is estimated to have been around 17 when she took part in battles and around 19 when she died.

Depending on who you ask, the average lifespan of a vampire can vary from hundreds to thousands to infinity years. Well, when it comes to the Underworld franchise, the same applies to Kate Beckinsale, the face of the series’ protagonist Selena.

Sure, 13 years between the first and fifth films do show a minimal difference in what Beckinsale looks like—it’s only natural—but otherwise, she’s the only immortal face of Selena in the live-action films.

There are talks of a 6th movie coming out. Back in 2017, the creator of the franchise Len Wiseman said Beckinsale will be coming back as Selena for this one too, but a year later, Beckinsale herself said she won’t as she has done so many already, so it is yet to be determined.

Cruella is one of the most well-known Disney villains out there. But before she became a Disney villain, she was an antagonist in Dodie Smith's 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians. It was five years later that she became a key figure in the Disney Universe.

Even though her first visual appearance was the animated adaptation of the novel back in 1961, the first live-action actress to take on the role was Glenn Close in 1996. Since then, the likes of Wendy Raquel Robinson and Victoria Smurfit been chosen to portray Cruella in the movie Descendants (2015) and the fourth and fifth seasons of Once Upon a Time (2011-2018) respectively, it seems that Close will not return to play the role any time soon as the upcoming (currently due 2021) live-action film Cruella, which will be detailing Cruella’s backstory, has will have Emma Stone take the lead as the antagonist.

Eva Ernst, better known as the Grand High Witch, from Roald Dahl’s famous 1983 fantasy novel The Witches, is the main antagonist in the book, and was portrayed by two people across two films: by Anjelica Huston in the 1990 adaptation, and Anne Hathaway in the 2020 iteration, both of the same name and based on this same novel. Besides the films, Eva was also portrayed by Tora Augestad in the opera version, and voiced by Amanda Laurence in the radio drama version.

This one’s a bit of a double whammy. Lara Croft was first a video game character, not a movie personality, but in both the games and the movies, she has changed. In the games, it was partly a natural progression of computer graphics, but the change was a bit more drastic in the tenth title in the series in 2013. The same happened in the movies: Angelina Jolie kicked it off in 2001’s Tomb Raider and continued in 2003’s The Cradle Of Life, and Alicia Vikander took over the role in 2018’s reboot.