Annie Wilkes

"God I love you."

- Annie after breaking Paul's legs.

Anne Marie Wilkes Dugan, usually known as Annie Wilkes, is the primary antagonist in Stephen King's horror novel Misery and its 1990 movie adaptaion. She is a demented, obsessive nurse and the self-proclaimed biggest fan of her favorite author, Paul Sheldon. She was ranked 17th on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.

Wilkes was born in Bakersfield, California and graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles nursing school in 1972. While serving as head maternity nurse at a Boulder, Colorado hospital, several infants in her care died under mysterious circumstances. She was tried for their deaths, but acquitted for lack of evidence. However, the press — which called her "the Dragon Lady" — strongly implied that she was in fact guilty. 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. She also killed her childhood neighbors and their father, her own father, her college roommate, and a hitchhiker she once slept with — in total, almost seventy people. Sheldon also finds that Wilkes was formerly married to a physical therapist named Frank Dugan, who later divorced from her, citing "mental cruelty."

In the movie she breaks romance novelist Paul Sheldon out of his trapped car during a snowstorm. She first appears to be a kind nuturing caregiver but when she learns that Paul plans to kill off her favorite character, Misery Chastain, she almost kills him. She then has Paul burn his new novel and tells him to write a new one. While doing so he attempts to escape seveal times. When she learns this she brutally breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer in an act of "hobbling". Later in the film, Paul's friend Sheriff Buster, after investigating Paul's disappearance, decides to check out Annie's house and eventually finds Paul locked up in the basement, before he can free him, Annie kills him with a shotgun and tries to kill Paul as well but he convinces her to let him finish the novel, eventually he manages to finish the novel and tells her to get him some wine, when she comes back he has set the book on fire as she tries to put it out he bashes her over the head with the typewriter, this makes her enraged and they fight, during the struggle he trips her and she lands on top of the typewriter, thinking her dead he wheels himself to the door but she continues to attack him and in the process a shelf is knocked over and he grabs a pig statue and beats her to death with it finally ending her terror.

A year later Paul is able to walk with the help of a cane and meets his discussing making a non-fiction novel of what happened to him. Paul disagrees to this while seeing Annie as one of the waitresses who tells him that she is his biggest fan, then turns back into the waitress.