Francis Dolarhyde
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| Hannibal Tetralogy character | |
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| Francis Dolarhyde | |
| Aliases | The Tooth Fairy |
| Gender | Male |
| Race | Caucasian |
| Relationships | Reba McClane (girlfriend) |
| M.O. | Placing mirror shards in the eyes of victims. |
| Weapon of Choice: | Pistol and his own teeth. |
| Portrayed by: | Tom Noonan and Ralph Fiennes |
Francis Dolarhyde is a fictional character featured in Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon. He is a serial killer nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy" due to his tendency to masticate his victims' bodies, the uncommon size and sharpness of his teeth and other apparent oral fixations.
[edit] Character history
Born in Springfield, Missouri, on June 14, 1938 with a bilateral cleft lip and palate, Dolarhyde suffered severe emotional and physical abuse in a series of orphanages and from his sadistic grandmother. After her death, he was turned over to the care of his estranged mother and her husband in St. Louis, Missouri; he was also abused by this family. He began torturing animals at a young age; after being caught breaking into a house at age 17, he was enlisted in the army. He developed dissociative identity disorder, his other, violent personality manifesting itself as a monstrous being who Dolarhyde ultimately came to call the "Great Red Dragon", from a painting by William Blake entitled The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun.
Dolarhyde began his killing spree in 1980 by murdering two families within a month, both crimes being committed on or near a full moon; It is hinted in the book that he had killed before that, however. He chose his victims through the home movies he edited as a film processing technician. He believed that by killing people (or "transforming" them, as he called it) he could fully become the Dragon. He had a large tattoo of a dragon emblazened on his back, and two sets of false teeth; one of them normal for his personal life, the other distorted and sharp for his killings. (There was also a sexual component to his crimes; he molested the corpse of one adult female victim, and he would often masturbate to the films he himself made while committing murder.)
FBI profiler Will Graham came out of early retirement to aid in his capture. Graham had previously captured Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a cannibalistic psychiatrist and serial killer, whom Dolarhyde idolized. Graham visited Lecter in the Chesapeake Mental Institute, hoping that the doctor would be able to help identify the Dragon, or at least assist in creating a psychological profile. Following this meeting, Lecter "helped" by sending Dolarhyde Graham's address in code. Dolarhyde was only foiled when FBI director Jack Crawford intercepted the message in time to warn off Graham's family.
Dolarhyde was an avid reader of The National Tattler, a tabloid which ran sensationalistic stories about serial killers, and he obsessively collected clippings about Lecter and Graham, as well as his own murders. To provoke Dolarhyde out of hiding, Graham gave an interview to Tattler reporter Freddy Lounds in which he said the "Tooth Fairy" was an impotent homosexual, and that Lecter considered him a "bottom-feeder." This enraged Dolarhyde, who kidnapped Lounds, forced him to recant his article on tape, and then bit his lips off, set him on fire and rolled him down an incline into the front door of the Tattler's office.
Over the course of the novel, Dolarhyde fell in love with a blind woman named Reba McClane. While at first her intimacy with Dolarhyde quelled his murderous impulses, her presence only infuriated the other part of Dolarhyde's psyche. Desperate now to retain control of himself and deny his violent urges, Dolarhyde flew to New York, where he devoured the original Blake watercolor, believing it would destroy the Dragon.
The plan failed, however; if anything, Dolarhyde's ingestion of the painting only made the Dragon angrier. Dolarhyde killed McClane's former lover after seeing them together at her house, and apparently had planned to kill her and himself by setting his house on fire with her in it. Dolarhyde relented at the last minute, however, and apparently shot himself. Fans have debated why Dolarhyde did this; some believe that it was all part of the Dragon's plan to escape capture, while others think this was the only way Dolarhyde could save McClane from his sinister alter ego.
In a later conversation with McClane, Graham told her, "There was plenty wrong with Dolarhyde, but there's nothing wrong with you. You said he was kind and thoughtful to you. I believe it. That's what you brought out in him. At the end, he couldn't kill you and he couldn't watch you die. People who study this kind of thing say he was trying to stop. Why? Because you helped him. That probably saved some lives. You didn't draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back."
It turned out, however, that Dolarhyde was alive, having merely shot the corpse of one of his previous victims. Being blind, McClane was fooled. Dolarhyde later attacked Graham and stabbed him in the face, only for Graham's wife Molly to attack him with an aluminium fishing rod, precipitating a struggle which ultimately resulted in Dolarhyde's death.
[edit] Appearance
As well as his poorly reconstructed cleft lip, Dolarhyde is recognizable by several features. He is very muscular, and bears a massive tattoo of the Red Dragon on his back, continuing down so its tail wraps around one leg (this was not present in Manhunter, although scenes with the tattoo were filmed but never used). Finally, he wears false teeth, alternating between two different sets; he wears standard prosthetics at work, and his "Dragon teeth," created in imitation of his grandmother's sharp, snaggle-toothed grin, when committing murder. With these teeth and his powerful jaw muscles, he can bite through fingers easily.
Dolarhyde maintains a massive ledger in which he keeps newspaper clippings describing his murders; besides the killings of Lounds and the two families, Harris implies that Dolarhyde was responsible for the murders of several elderly women (the ledger contains articles about their mysterious disappearances.) Dolarhyde also kept Lounds' lips in a baggie in the ledger.
[edit] Film adaptations
Dolarhyde has been twice portrayed in movie adaptations of Harris' novel: By Tom Noonan (in which he was called 'Dollarhyde' instead of Dolarhyde) in 1986's Manhunter, and by Ralph Fiennes in 2002's Red Dragon. Noonan's depiction was critically acclaimed, and is often cited as more effective, believable and disturbing, though not as detailed, complex and as accurate to the novel as Fiennes'.
In Manhunter, Dollarhyde was filmed two different ways; shirtless with an elaborate tattoo covering his upper torso and back (as opposed to Dolarhyde's tattoos in the book, which only covered his back), and with a shirt on thus covering his tattoo. The latter was used in the finished film, partly because the tattoos were considered too distracting and similar to the ones that the Yakuza wore. The look, however, appeared on promotional photos for the film.
In the first movie, Graham kills Dolarhyde, while in the second, both he and his wife have a hand in Dolarhyde's death, with Graham firing the majority of the shots in a crossfire with Dolarhyde, and his wife finishing him off as Dolarhyde rises back up, even with the bullet wounds.
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The Hannibal Tetralogy |
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The Books Red Dragon | The Silence of the Lambs | Hannibal | Hannibal Rising The Films Red Dragon | The Silence of the Lambs | Hannibal | Hannibal Rising |
Main Characters Secondary Characters |
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The Directors Other |
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