Barbara Stanwyck

This is the woman who leads mild-mannered (if a bit randy) insurance man, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) to murder (in Billy Wilder's masterful Double Indemnity).  Everything about Barbara Stanwyck's face is wrong by today's studio standards.  Her nose alone would get her no further than the casting couch.  To put it bluntly, there is something mannish about her.  But Stanwyck excelled in the role of  the femme fatale and in conveying unquenchable sensuality. And it's precisely her ability to channel/deploy this near-metaphysical eroticism that makes Neff's attraction to her so understandable and believable--even today.