General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

She-Devil

She-Devil is a 1989 American comedy directed by Susan Seidelman, starring Roseanne Barr as a vengeful housewife and Meryl Streep as the romance novelist with whom her husband runs off. It was released by Orion Pictures on December 8, 1989, runs 99 minutes, and is rated PG-13.¹ The film is an adaptation of Fay Weldon's 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and it marked Roseanne Barr's feature film acting debut.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	December 8, 1989 (theatrical), Orion Pictures; 99 minutes; PG-13¹
Source	Fay Weldon's 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; the film used only the first half of the novel¹
Cast	Roseanne Barr (Ruth Patchett), Meryl Streep (Mary Fisher), Ed Begley Jr. (Bob), Linda Hunt (Hooper), Sylvia Miles (Mrs. Fisher)²
Box office	$12.8 million gross in the United States; $15.4 million worldwide against a budget estimated at $16–25 million²^•³^•¹
Reception	46% on the Tomatometer (24 reviews), 49% audience score, Metascore 45, IMDb 5.8/10²^•⁴
Recognition	Golden Globe nomination for Meryl Streep, Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy (1990)³
Other versions	A six-part BBC miniseries adaptation, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, aired in 1986¹

Spoilers

Plot

Ruth Patchett (Roseanne Barr) is a housewife and mother living with her accountant husband Bob (Ed Begley Jr.) and their two children in the suburbs outside New York City. Bob begins an affair with Mary Fisher (Meryl Streep), a wealthy, glamorous writer of romance novels, and eventually leaves Ruth for her.²

Bent on revenge, Ruth begins an intricate campaign to destroy everything Bob holds dear, and she has plans for Fisher as well.² She makes a list of her husband's assets, Home, Family, Career, and Freedom, and destroys each in turn; along the way she works a series of jobs until she forms her own employment agency, the Vesta Rose Employment Agency, which she uses as a vehicle against her husband.⁵^•⁶ The film ends on a triumphant note for Ruth, with Mary Fisher's new book, Trust and Betrayal: A Docu-novel of Love, Money and Skepticism, a success, and Ruth appearing at the book signing.⁷

Interpretation

Scholarly readings have treated the film as a satire of 1980s gender roles. An analysis in UC Santa Barbara's Focus describes the contrast between Mary, an embodiment of wealth, fragility, and pseudo-romance, and Ruth, a frumpy middle-class housewife, as highlighting rigid stereotypes about women, with the narrative forming an oppositional statement on traditional family, gender roles, and economic inequality in the conservative political atmosphere of the 1980s.¹² Seidelman herself called it "sort of a political film."¹³ A survey of Weldon's career notes that neither the 1986 television adaptation nor the 1989 film quite achieved the "carnivalesque vindictiveness" of the original text.¹⁴

Production and casting

Director Susan Seidelman, whose earlier films included Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan, was drawn to Weldon's novel after noticing a friend's blurb on the dust jacket of a bookshop copy, and Weldon chose to option the book to her despite an offer from John Huston.¹ Seidelman sent the script to Meryl Streep without specifying which role she would play, and was reportedly delighted when Streep chose the role of Mary Fisher rather than the lead. Seidelman then looked for a "larger than life" actress to play opposite her and cast the television star Roseanne Barr, who had never appeared in a theatrical film.¹

Principal photography began on April 12, 1989. Filming took place in New York City, with locations including a Stanford White-designed mansion on Long Island Sound standing in for Mary Fisher's home, a mansion in Piermont, New York doubling as a retirement home, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the Guggenheim Museum, and the city's first police precinct station at South Street Seaport.¹ Budget estimates varied: one article cited $25 million, while an April 1989 Village Voice item estimated the cost at $16 million.¹ The film carried the working title She-Devils in early 1989.¹

Adaptation from the novel

The film departs substantially from Weldon's book. The novel's Ruth Patchett stands six feet two inches tall, and late in the book she has cosmetic surgery that shortens her legs and reshapes her looks so that they resemble Mary Fisher's. Seidelman cast the much shorter Barr and left out the plastic surgery subplot altogether, opting for a happier ending in which Ruth triumphs rather than morphing into her nemesis; contemporary sources including Time Out (London) noted that the feature film used only the first half of the novel.¹

Weldon's own response was negative. Interviewed by Shirley Kossick, the novelist said she had hated the Hollywood offering, on which she was not consulted, but had really liked the BBC television version, screened in four parts (the BBC adaptation was a six-part miniseries according to the AFI Catalog).⁸^•¹ A later scholarly account observes that the film's omission of Ruth's transformation into Mary Fisher may have been intended to simplify the plot or to portray a more morally acceptable journey, "from frump to feminist feelgood," and that Barr's diminutive stature removed the novel's central joke, that Ruth above all desires to look up to men.⁸ Weldon, who died in January 2023 at 91, was known for sharp, often feminist fiction about women's experiences and sexual politics.⁹

Reception and box office

Critical reception was mixed. The film holds a 46% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes from 24 reviews, with an average rating of 4.90/10 among critics who supplied ratings, and a 49% audience score from more than 10,000 ratings; Metacritic records a Metascore of 45, categorized as mixed or average.²^•⁴ Reviewers singled out Streep's comic turn: Variety called the casting "a real coup," saying Streep blew away "any notion that she can't be funny," and Roger Ebert, giving 3 of 4 stars, wrote that Barr demonstrated "a core of reality inside her TV persona" that provided a sound foundation for her comic acting.² Negative assessments included the Chicago Tribune's view that the film's vulgar moments seemed "grim and desperate" substitutes for laughs, and Time Out judged the adaptation misjudged, arguing that Barr "just isn't imposing enough to inspire notions of devilish vengeance."⁴^•⁵

At the box office the film opened against a direct competitor in the same genre. On its debut weekend it earned an estimated $3.5 million on 1,403 screens, against $9.3 million on 1,260 screens for Fox's marital-revenge black comedy The War of the Roses, which opened the same weekend; per-screen averages were $2,502 for She-Devil versus $7,380 for The War of the Roses.¹⁰ Domestic grosses were described as disappointing, with the film taking in $7.8 million after three weeks of release, though overseas openings in Australia, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and Finland looked more promising.¹¹ It finished with $12.8 million in United States gross and $15.4 million worldwide.²^•³ Streep's performance earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for 1990.³

Other films of the same name

The title also belongs to an unrelated 1957 American science fiction film, She Devil, directed by Kurt Neumann and starring Mari Blanchard, Jack Kelly, and Albert Dekker. It runs 77 minutes and adapts Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1935 story "The Adaptive Ultimate," about biochemists who give a fruit-fly serum to a woman dying of tuberculosis, curing her but producing an aggressive, conscienceless personality.¹⁵^•¹⁶ A 15-minute horror comedy titled She Devil, directed by Allie Perison, was released in 2025.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Satirical, black, and parody comedies of the 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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