Annie Wilkes - Character Background

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 the protagonist, 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.

Wilkes is enraged when she discovers Sheldon killed off Misery at the end of his latest novel. She tells him she has not called a hospital or told anybody about him, and makes a veiled threat on his life. She holds him captive in her home and subjects him to a series of physical and psychological tortures. She also forces him to burn the only copy of a novel he felt would put him back on track as a mainstream author, and then makes him write a new novel bringing Misery back to life. Sheldon writes the book as Wilkes wants, but chafes under her torture and manages to sneak out of his room several times while she's away.

On one of his trips out of his room, Sheldon finds Wilkes' old scrapbook and learns from the newspaper clippings inside that she is a serial killer whose spree dates back to her childhood in Bakersfield. Among her victims were a neighboring family, her own father, her college roommate, and a hitchhiker with whom she had a brief fling. Sheldon also learns that she killed several patients at other hospitals where she worked, but no one noticed because they were either very sick or suffered debilitating injuries beforehand. While serving as head maternity nurse at a hospital in Boulder, Colorado; 11 infants in her care died under mysterious circumstances. She was tried for their deaths, but acquitted for lack of evidence. Sheldon also finds that Wilkes was formerly married to a physical therapist named Ralph Dugan, who later divorced her, citing "mental cruelty." The last picture is an article about Sheldon's own disappearance, leading him to fear that he is Wilkes' next victim.

Sheldon doesn't know it, but Wilkes has known all along that he has been sneaking around her house. This sets off one of the film's most infamous scenes, in which she breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer to stop him from escaping. In the book she chops off his foot with an axe and cauterizes it with a blowtorch, and later cuts off one of his thumbs with an electric knife when he complains about a missing letter on his typewriter (this never happens in the film).

In the book, Wilkes brutally murders a Colorado state trooper who sees Sheldon in her house by stabbing him with a wooden cross and running him over with a lawnmower. In the film, the local sheriff comes to Wilkes' farm to investigate Sheldon's disappearance. Wilkes drugs Sheldon and hides him in her basement before subsequently killing the officer with a double-barreled shotgun as he hears Sheldon's cries for help.

Wilkes then says they should "celebrate" the new novel in a murder-suicide. Sheldon pretends to go along with it, telling her he needs a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne and a cigarette, as per his usual practice after finishing a book. He soaks the manuscript with lighter fluid he picked up in the basement and sets it ablaze. While Wilkes tries to put the fire out, Sheldon overpowers her by cracking her over the head with his typewriter and choking her. In the film, he chokes her with pages of the burnt novel. In the novel, he chokes her with blank pages which she believes to be the book; the real novel was hidden from sight and was later published.

She ultimately dies of a fractured skull; Sheldon is then rescued by police. In the book, she fractures her skull when she slips and falls on the mantle of the guest room bed. When the police go in to search the bedroom where Wilkes is believed to have died, they find it empty. It is later revealed that, despite being mortally wounded, she managed to escape the bedroom and died in her barn with her hands on a chainsaw, which she presumably intended to use on Sheldon. In the movie, Sheldon kills her by ramming a metal statue of her pet sow pig — named Misery after his stories — into her head.