Classic Characters of the 20 Most Beautiful Female Celebrities over 30

13) Madeleine Marie Stowe

Terry Gilliam’s ambitious “12 Monkeys” was co-authored by David Peoples, who wrote “Blade Runner,” and it has the same view of the near future as a grunge pit – a view it shares with Gilliam’s own “Brazil.” In this world, everything is rusty, subterranean, and leaks. The movie uses its future world as a home base and launching pad for the central story, which is set in 1990 and 1996 and is about a time traveler trying to save the world from a deadly plague.

The traveler is Cole (Bruce Willis), Cole is plucked from his cage and sent on a surface expedition by the rulers of this domain, who hope to learn enough about the plague virus to defeat it. Later, he is picked for a more crucial mission: He will travel back in time and gather information about the virus before it mutated. (The movie holds out no hope that he can “stop” it before it starts; from his point of view, the plague has already happened, and so the future society is seeking treatment, not prevention.) Cole lands in 1990, bruised, bleeding, and dripping sweat and mucus from every pore (a large percentage of Bruce Willis’ film career has been spent in this condition). He’s thrown in jail and assigned a psychiatrist, Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), who believes he’s delusional when he says he’s a visitor from the future (“You won’t think I’m crazy when people start dying next month”). He pulls off an inexplicable jailbreak and reappears in her life in 1996, kidnapping her because he needs help in finding 12 monkeys in Philadelphia that have the virus in its “pure” form before it mutated, later that year, into a killer of humans.