Why aren’t there more formidable women in movies?

THEY’RE the women who were just too scary, or weird, or both, for Hollywood to make a movie about them.

It’s a strange fact that so few movies or TV shows centred around a woman are made, with the reaction to Jodie Whittaker being cast as the 13th Doctor earlier this week highlighting this.

From Mary Poppins to Mrs Doubtfire, Betty Boop to Lisa Simpson, it seems showbiz doesn’t want to admit some females can just be, well, downright lethal, powerful or terrifying.

Perhaps they really are just too powerful to be given the Hollywood treatment. Maybe they fear all the girls will want to be this aggressive or smart?

This week, to try to bring these formidable female furies to prominence again, here are our top Ladies Who Should Be In Movies.

BOUDICA

OVER 70,000 Romans were killed during her attacks, she burned large chunks of our islands to the ground and came No 35 in the BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons poll.

So why on Earth are we still waiting for a real big-budget blockbuster movie on this incredibly-intimidating woman?

Isn’t it high time we saw a Boudica blockbuster coming out of Tinseltown — or is she just too scary?

NITOCRIS

THEY do say revenge is a dish best served cold, and boy, did this wickedly plotting woman do that.

She ruled well over 4,000 years ago, replacing her brother who had been murdered by high-ranking Egyptians.

For a good while, Nitocris did gentle, womanly things, such as designing and creating pyramids.

After some years, she announced a grand feast for various notables, and once she had them at their tables, she sneaked out and had the room flooded, drowning the lot of them.

She then took her own life, by apparently “rushing into a chamber of hot ashes and dying, Viking-style”.

Now, that would also make a decent movie, would it not?

Broadchurch star Jodie Whittaker unveiled as the first female Doctor Who

LYUDMILA PAVLICHENKO

THIS 25-year-old Ukraine-born woman became known as Lady Death, the greatest female sniper of all time and bane of the Nazis.

When the Germans bombed her university, she went to the nearest recruiting centre to join up — told that sniping was men’s work, she produced diplomas to show she was an ace with a rifle.

She thought up some devilishly-good ideas to fool the Nazis, so she could kill even more of them, such as strapping dummies to trees and leaving cloths fluttering in the wind to distract them.

And then she would shoot them right between the eyes.

Later, she would shoot them in the legs, to draw out medical helpers.

Who she would also shoot.

She killed 309 enemy troops, and merits an awesome movie.

MANUELA SAENZ

ANY woman who wears a moustache she tore off a defeated enemy is a bit out of the ordinary.

This Ecuadorian harridan had been married off to Englishman James Thorne, her family hoping he would make her calm down and behave like a lady.

Instead, she ran away from him, became a war general, went on arduous 1,000-mile mountain treks seeking new people to fight, and caused mayhem everywhere.

Oh, and she kept a pet bear to scare guests and saved Venezuelan President Simon Bolivar from two assassination attempts.

KUMANDER LIWAYWAY

THIS so-called Joan of Arc of the Philippines wore lipstick on the battlefield and spent her childhood making dresses.

When Japan invaded her country, though, her father, a mayor, organised resistance, but the enemy caught him, executed him and left his corpse on view.

Liwayway was so enraged and set on revenge that within a month she was commanding an entire squadron.

She led her troops to victories over Japanese forces, often when they were hugely outnumbered.

Her real name Remedios Gomez-Paraiso, she passed away three years ago.

HESTER STANHOPE

THE Desert Queen, as she’d become known, left her privileged aristocratic life behind to travel through the Middle East.

Born in 1776 in Kent, she would shrug off shipwrecks, plague and attacks by Bedouin tribesmen.

Six feet tall, she was treated like a princess in the Middle East but forgotten in Blighty.

RANAVALONA I

THIS 1800s ruler of Madagascar is thought to have killed up to 50% of her own country’s population, and came up with some novel ways to do so.

One of her ideas, apparently, was gigantic scissors. We leave your imagination to work out the rest . . .

She did lead her country to keep its independence, miraculously seeing off both English and French forces.

Alas, she was also a hardliner at home, and when her husband died she had some strange new laws to mark the sad event — she made it illegal to bathe, play music, sleep on a mattress, dance, look in mirrors or clap hands.

She hated Christians, and would make the missionaries eat poisoned chicken.

Oh, and she brought back slavery when all around were abolishing it.

NOOR INAYAT KHAN

A BRITISH secret agent in the Second World War, she worked as the only radio operator in occupied Paris, a job that had an average life expectancy of six weeks.

Noor lasted five months, kept one step ahead of the Gestapo and did some great work.

Incredible as it seems now, she disliked Britain and had pledged to fight for Indian independence once the war was won.

She was eventually captured, interrogated mercilessly and died in a concentration camp, having not revealed a thing.

ELISABETH BATHORY

SOME reckon this woman was the original inspiration for Dracula.

Born in 1560s Hungary, she would become the Blood Countess, the most-prolific female serial killer of all time.

She would beat and strangle her servants, she poisoned a rival, went after people with scissors, saws, hot irons and needles — anything she could get her hands on, really.

KHUTULUN

Born in the Mongol Empire in 1260, she was the great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan.

Khutulun had many, many marriage proposals but always insisted that the man who would become her husband had to beat her at wrestling first.

If he lost, he had to give her 100 horses.

More than 10,000 free horses later, she still hadn’t got married . . .