9 Notable Nurses That Never Were

May 12th is International Nurses Day. Unless you’ve spent a great deal of time laid up in the hospital or have a nurse for a family member, you don’t know a lot of real-life nurses.  We remember a lot of Hollywood nurses, however.  From the great movies we’ve watched over the years we’ve come to either hate them or love them, laugh at them or cry over their trials.

In honor of these fictional care workers, I’ve put together a nice variety of notorious, notable or downright naughty nurses.  Enjoy…

9 Notable Nurses That Never Were

Nurse Christine Chapel

Played by Majel Barrett, Nurse Chapel was the head nurse aboard the Starship Enterprise in the TV series Star Trek.  Her husband had disappeared five years earlier, and shows up on a strange planet during one episode, having replaced his heavily damaged body with an android.  Chapel is aghast at this turn of events, and her husband kills himself in despair.  Nurse Chapel goes on to have a long-standing but unrequited love for Dr. Spock.  A woman, yet again, in pursuit of a hard, cold shoulder.

Elle Driver

Although not really a nurse, the lovely killer for hire, played by Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill, sneaks into a hospital changing room, to emerge as an almost iconic sinister and naughty nurse, with a mission to snuff out Uma Thurman, who lies in a coma.

Nurse Betty

In Nurse Betty, Renee Zellweger plays Betty Sizemore, who after seeing her husband killed, mentally breaks down.  She decides that she is actually a nurse on a daytime television show she is watching.  She dresses up, plays the part in real life, and things get pretty interesting from there.

Nurse Jenny Fields

In The World According to Garp, Glenn Close plays an asexual, opinionated and strong-willed nurse who decides to become impregnated by a wounded soldier on his death bed.  She raises her son (named T.S. after Technical Sergeant Garp – his father) alone, obtaining a position at his school to keep a close eye on him.  After her son graduates, she begins a third career as a best-selling, equally loved and reviled feminist author.

Nurse Murch

In The Right Stuff, Jane Dornacker steals a few scenes as the completely unattractive, absolutely unflappable and quietly mysterious nurse who works for the early NASA program in determining the physical fitness of astronaut candidates.  No amount of banter from the sweet-talking candidates sway her, as she deals with, among other things, obtaining sperm samples from them.

Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan

In over 250 episodes of the military medical unit series M.A.S.H., Loretta Swit played a sexually gregarious and professionally hard-nosed lead nurse.  Known early on as a one-woman welcoming committee to any visiting male official, her character developed over the years into a warm-hearted, respected and sympathetic woman.  It’s hard to feel sexy when you are surrounded by bullets.

Gaylord Focker

Ben Stiller plays a completely under-appreciated and disrespected male nurse fiancé in Meet the Parents.  His attempts at being accepted into his bride-to-be’s family are either rebuffed or are hilarious (and physically damaging) failures.

Annie Wilkes

In the Stephen King thriller Misery, Kathy Bates plays a former nurse, who is an overly obsessed and psychotic fan of writer Paul Sheldon, who unfortunately winds up stranded near her country home.  She “cares” for him by taking him prisoner, ruining him physically, scaring him out of his long-standing writer’s block, and forcing him to write another novel for her, just to survive.

Nurse Ratched

The quintessential hard-nosed control freak care worker, played by Louise Fletcher, In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Ratched’s sadistic desire to keep her patients neatly under her thumb leads to a revolt, led by R. P. McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson.  It is considered to be the performance of both their lives.

This article first appeared at Technorati.com as 9 Notable Nurses That Never Were – please visit my article there and enjoy another read!

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Posted by Steve Woods on May 12 2011. Filed under Just For Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry