‘The Stepford Wives’ Turns 50! Check Out These 6 Perfectly Terrifying Facts You Didn’t Know About the Film

Gabrielle Moss February 12, 2:42 pm

THE STEPFORD WIVES, Katharine Ross on poster art, 1975. Collage — Everett Collection

In the 50 years since The Stepford Wives was originally released on Feb. 12, 1975, the term “Stepford wife” has become a part of our cultural lexicon — you don’t have to have seen the original film (or the 2004 remake starring Nicole Kidman) to know that a woman who’s robotically obsessed with having the perfect home and family seems like she stepped straight out of Stepford, Connecticut. But the film about a small town where the menfolk use some truly shocking methods to turn their wives into tireless homemakers wasn’t immediately considered a classic. In fact, when it was first released, it did poorly at the box office, with critics and with the very viewers it was supposed to appeal to — modern women interested in careers and “women’s lib.”

What else don’t you know about this sci-fi classic? Put on your frilliest apron, make sure you have a pie baking in the oven, and read on to find out.

1Diane Keaton was interested in the script — but her therapist wasn’t

Diane Keaton was among the many well-known actresses who considered playing protagonist Joanna Eberhart, including Jean Seberg and Tuesday Weld. But Keaton dropped out of the film with an explanation that’s unusual even by flaky Hollywood standards: She showed the script to her analyst, who felt that it gave off “bad vibes.” The role eventually went to The Graduate‘s Katharine Ross.

2Katharine Ross couldn’t bear to (pretend to) stab Paula Prentiss

Near the film’s climax, Ross’ Joanna stabs Bobbie (Paula Prentiss), her best friend who has fallen victim to the Stepford Men’s Association’s plans to replace their wives with subservient robots. “I remember that it was very hard for me, even though they had made this sort of Styrofoam midsection [for Prentiss],” Ross told Entertainment Weekly in a 2019 interview. “It was very hard for me to stab, even something that wasn’t real. So that’s [director Bryan Forbes’ hand] on the knife that you see going in.”

3It wasn’t immediately embraced as a feminist classic

Today, The Stepford Wives is considered one of the first films to use horror and science fiction to analyze women’s lives, using the metaphors of secret societies and android doubles to examine the relentless pressure often put on women to be perfect.

But when the film was released, it didn’t get a warm reception from the very women who had helped inspire it. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique inspired author Ira Levin to pen the original Stepford Wives novel in 1972; but Friedan proclaimed the finished film “a rip-off of the women’s movement” and encouraged other women to boycott it.

“[Friedan] was very upset about our movie,” Tina Louise, who played Stepford wife Charmaine, recalled in a 2019 Entertainment Weekly interview. “Very upset. She thought [novel author] Ira Levin was saying that’s the way things should be, but he didn’t feel that way at all.”

4It was Dee Wallace and Mary Stuart Masterson’s first film

Future E.T. star Dee Wallace made her film debut in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role as a maid. But actress Mary Stuart Masterson‘s role may be even harder to spot. Though she began to achieve fame in her early 20s as the star of films like 1987’s Some Kind of Wonderful, in The Stepford Wives, she plays the Eberharts’ 7-year-old daughter, Kim … an easy role for her, since she was the real-life daughter of Peter Masterson, who played Walter Eberhart. Young Mary can be seen prominently in the film’s opening sequence.

5There were sequels … a LOT of sequels

Though you might recall the 2004 remake, The Stepford Wives also spawned three sequels, all of which were made-for-TV movies. In 1980, we got Revenge of the Stepford Wives, where Cagney and Lacey‘s Sharon Gless played an intrepid reporter looking to ferret out the town’s secrets; a pre-fame Don Johnson and Julie Kavner appear as a young couple who get drawn into Stepford’s dark traditions.

1987’s The Stepford Children starred Barbara Eden as a new mom in town who discovers that the Men’s Association is now turning children into docile androids, too; and 1996’s The Stepford Husbands flipped the genders. It starred Donna Mills as a new wife in town whose husband becomes shockingly passive after a stay at the local mental hospital, and Cindy Williams as an evil schemer helping to drug the men of Stepford into compliance.

6It inspired a modern horror favorite

Like many horror movies that go on to become considered classics, The Stepford Wives was never nominated for any major awards in its time. But in inspired a film that become the rare horror movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar: 2017’s Get Out. Much like The Stepford Wives, Get Out also focuses on a group of malevolent people who use a fantastical procedure to take over other people’s bodies and control them — though in Get Out, race, rather than gender, is the evil group’s focus.

Get Out director Jordan Peele took inspiration not just from The Stepford Wives, but also from another film based on a book by Ira Levin: Rosemary’s Baby. In both films, Peele said in an interview at UCLA’s “Script to Screen,” “the main character couldn’t quite tell if something really dark and horrendous was happening, or if this was just garden variety, average social weirdness.”