Habit forming: my favorite fictional nuns

Cloaked in white, the sisters of Black Narcissus glide about their Himalayan nunnery like ghosts. Their veils jut forward to obscure their faces and restrict their peripheral vision, a precursor of the horse blinder-like headgear of The Handmaid’s Tale. This get-up is especially apt for Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh, numbing the pain of a lost love by remaining fastidiously focused on her duty as a missionary.

Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth, meanwhile, is too mentally elsewhere to make for much of a nun. Clodagh expresses her doubts in the beginning, and as Black Narcissus shifts from uncomfortable to horrifying and Ruth goes fully insane, it’s clear her instinct was correct. The possessed nun is a trope all its own, but the nuns here are not controlled by the devil; God or divinity hardly enters the movie. These nuns—mad, repressed, isolated—are all too human.

A slight stretch, I’ll admit, as Maria von Trapp was a real person. But the considerably fictionalized musical and subsequent movie adaptation of her life left such a pop cultural impact that Maria has moved beyond real person to icon and symbol. Julie Andrews’ portrayal of von Trapp is more nun as domestic angel or fairy than actual person—the film’s poster even presents her in a Christlike pose.

Maria is by far the purest nun on this list. The Sound Of Music is a classic tale of good versus evil: the governess and the family she cares for flee the Nazis amid some of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most beloved songs ever. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman called his script “a fairy tale that’s almost real,” and that “almost” does a lot of work. It’s a mostly true story heightened to fantastical levels, and it may well have invented a Manic Pixie Dream Nun.

There was a time when Sally Field had to fight to be taken seriously as an actor, and, to hear her tell it, it was largely because of The Flying Nun. The series, which ran on ABC from 1967 until 1970, is unabashedly silly; Field’s Sister Bertrille weighs 90 pounds and wears a distinctive Cornette that is starched enough to help her soar across her San Juan community, solving problems and delighting children along the way.

That premise is bonkers and irresistible, The Flying Nun is a vital part of the kitschy era of genies, witches, and comic book heroes on TV. Bertrille is sugary-sweet and naive, but came to the convent after being arrested in a “free-speech protest,” a quick nod to the outside world that the series mostly otherwise ignores. The fact that it was so out-of-step with the real world left Field embarrassed, but there is no world in which Bertrille would resemble a real person. The series is just as off-beat today as I imagine it’d have been in the ’60s; now that’s a timeless nun.

The singing nun is a well-worn trope; this list has already seen Maria von Trapp, and, the same year that hit theaters, there was The Singing Nun, a film about The Singing Nun (best known for her song “Dominique,” which features in season two of American Horror Story—we’ll get to that). Airport 1975 saw Helen Reddy-as-nun performing for a sick child aboard a flight, which is probably better remembered for its parody in Airplane!

In Airplane!, though, the nun simply donates the guitar that’s used to serenade and further injure the sick child aboard the plane. Portrayed by Maureen McGovern of “The Morning After”/Poseidon Adventure fame, the does get to sing a brief snippet of “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” later in the movie; to have a nun and to not have her sing would be a colossal disappointment. She won’t be the last one on this list.

Behind only Maria von Trapp, Whoopi Goldberg’s Deloris van Cartier is probably our most famous singing nun. The nuns of Sister Act have left an indelible impact on popular culture, with a first sequel arriving in 1993 and a second, with Keke Palmer and Lizzo rumored to be in the cast, on the horizon.

What I love about the first Sister Act, though, is that these singing nuns are kind of bad. Deloris isn’t a miracle worker—she’s only pretending to be a nun. There’s true joy in singing simply for the love of doing it, despite being bad at it, and I think that’s a big part of why Sister Act remains such a comforting watch for people over 30 years later. (The musical adaptation starring Patina Miller that opened in London in 2009 is pretty decent too—even if the nuns are a bit too good at singing in that one.)

Though Madeline dates back to the late 1930s in book form, the definitive version of the story in my mind will always be the cartoon series that ran from 1993 until 2001. It bounced around networks, but I think I probably watched it on Disney Channel or what was then ABC Family. In this version, Madeline’s caretaker, Miss Clavel, has a very fun song in many episodes called “Something Is Not Right” that I still think of when something is not right (read: often).

Surprising even myself, Miss Clavel is the only cartoon nun on this list. While plenty of these women are basically live-action cartoons, Clavel’s design and simple song bring to mind a Mother Goose character. She was also portrayed in live-action form by a wacky Frances McDormand, just two years after her Oscar win for Fargo—I also remember that version as being decent, though I haven’t seen it since the Bush administration.

To me, The Town is a spiritual sequel to Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon has moved to California and Ben Affleck is left with playing dress up and robbing banks. Affleck’s best costume in the whole flick, though, is when he and his boys get in the habit to support their bank robbing habit. Bonus points to these nuns for being doubly not real—within the context of the movie, they’re also fictional nuns. I hereby dub Ben Affleck in The Town “The Most Fictional Nun.”

I joke, but these costumes are genuinely terrifying. Affleck’s Doug and the rest of his crew wear the masks of old women, eyes dark and blank and mouths permanently beaked into a coo. (The guns and affliction for violence don’t help much, either.) I imagine these Boston-based criminals were much more acquainted with strict, school-marm nuns than the singing variety; it makes sense that these were among the scariest costumes they could think of.

It only took Ryan Murphy two seasons of his anthology American Horror Story to tap into his Catholic school upbringing for Asylum. Jessica Lange’s Sister Jude is the classic punisher nun, church wine-drunk with power. Lily Rabe’s Sister Mary Eunice embodies not one but two nun tropes: the novice and the possessed. And yes, both of them sing at various points.

Asylum remains my favorite season of AHS (but, admittedly, I haven’t seen all of them). I like the 1960s as Hell, and the nuns working as devils. In my mind, the ’60s were an especially Catholic decade, what with the Kennedys, Vatican II, and the proliferation of nuns in popular culture. Catholic school attendance in the United States peaked in the mid ’60s. But when you talk to anyone who went through that schooling, it sounded like a nightmare. My dad is still scared of nuns. I don’t want to say that Asylum contains the most “accurate” nuns, but it certainly taps into an attitude towards them that many people earned.

Somewhere between Maria von Trapp and Sister Jude, we arrive at Derry’s own Sister Michael, the disciplinarian nun at Our Lady Immaculate College. Michael is a subtly hilarious figure that we all recognize, whether or not we went to Catholic school. You never know exactly what she’s going to say, but you can bet that it’s probably insulting.

While nuns-as-teachers have mostly appeared in this list as either monsters or angels, Michael is wholly uninterested in nurturing. This isn’t to say she’s a bad teacher; sometimes, the perfect counter to teenage narcissism is total apathy. Derry Girls is all about spending your last moments of childhood innocence amid conflict and forces far beyond your years—what better embodiment of that than a sister?

Sister Simone is another nun that feels very spiritually 1960s—at its best, Mrs. Davis has the manic energy of a Saturday morning cartoon like Johnny Quest. There really is just something about the sight of a nun riding her motorcycle, habit blowing in the wind behind her, that tickles my soul. Simone is also literally married to Jesus, so there’s certainly an argument to be made that she takes her vows more seriously (so far) than any nun to have entered this list.

The last real contemporary nun to exist on this list came in 1992 with Sister Act—between that and Mrs. Davis, everything I’ve included has been from a period piece or The Town. So, even if Mrs. Davis doesn’t always stick the landing, I do appreciate seeing a modern nun dealing with the decidedly modern problems of A.I. and the algorithm. Nuns feel out of step with our world, but looking back they kind of always have been—that’s the point. Nuns deliberately take a step back from regular society. Sometimes, that leaves them out of touch, but sometimes, it gives them the clarity to see just what’s wrong.