Bud Corliss
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Bud Corliss is the villain of Ira Levin's 1953 novel A Kiss Before Dying. He was portrayed by Robert Wagner in the 1956 film adaptation of the novel, and by Matt Dillon in the 1991 remake.
Corliss was born into a working class family and raised by his mother after his father walked out. A cold, manipulative sociopath, he used his uncanny ability to adapt his personality to any given situation to chase his dreams of wealth and success — to be achieved by any means necessary.
An overachiever, he was a stellar student in high school, and enlisted in the Korean War at 18, returning as a decorated hero. The most pivotal moment in his life occurred during the war, when he cornered, shot and killed a Korean soldier, who was so terrified of an American soldier with a gun that he wet his pants. Corliss was both elated by the total power he held over the Korean and disgusted by a display of terror he considered weak and unmanly, and made up his mind right then and there to never show anyone any sign of vulnerability.
Upon returning to the U.S., he enrolled in college, where he met Dorothy Kingship, the daughter of a wealthy steel tycoon. Seeing an opportunity to attain the riches he had always craved, he became Dorothy's lover, but panicked when she announced she was pregnant; he was sure that her stern, conservative father would disown her, and he would lose his chance to inherit a fortune. Resolving to get rid of Dorothy, he tricked her into writing a letter that, to an unknowing observer, would look like a suicide note, and murdered her. He ran no risk of getting caught, as he had urged Dorothy to keep their relationship a secret from her family and friends. He continued to live with his mother, who doted on him and had no clue as to what he had done.
Corliss lay low for a few months until the media coverage of Dorothy's death had subsided, and then pursued Dorothy's sister, Ellen. The romance was going exactly according to plan — until Gordon Grant, a college disc jockey who suspected foul play in Dorothy's death and had followed Corliss to discover his plan, told Ellen that her boyfriend had murdered her sister. Distraught, Ellen confronted Corliss, who calmly confessed before murdering her as well.
Not to be discouraged, Corliss then courted the last remaining Kingship daughter, Mary. This affair was the most successful; Corliss swept her off her feet, met and charmed her father, and eventually asked her to marry him, a proposal she gleefully accepted.
Grant refused to give up, however, breaking into Corliss' childhood home and stealing a written plan for meeting and seducing Mary to get her family's money, as well as news clippings about Dorothy and Ellen's deaths, from his room. Days before the wedding, he showed up at the Kingship family home and presented Mary and her father with the evidence of Corliss' deception. Horrified, they decided to confront Corliss.
On a trip to one of the Kingship family's steel manufacturing plants, Mary, her father, and Grant all cornered Corliss while he was standing over a vat of molten steel and threatened to expose him. Corliss frantically pleaded his innocence, but they were unmoved. Realizing his luck had finally run out and that he was facing the electric chair, Corliss at last lost his composure and wet his pants — just as the Korean soldier, his symbol of pathetic cowardice, had done. Delirious with panic and shame, Corliss lost his footing and fell to his death into the vat below.
The 1956 film followed the novel's plot fairly closely, but the 1991 remake, while leaving Corliss' character basically unchanged (other than renaming him Jonathon), drastically changed the story. In this adaptation, Corliss faked his own suicide after murdering Dorothy, and re-emerged as "Jay Faraday" to woo and marry Ellen (the "Mary" character was written out of the movie.) The "Grant" character was recast as a Homicide detective who had investigated Dorothy's death. Also, in the remake, Corliss met his end while attempting to kill Ellen after she discovered who he really was; while chasing her down, he was run over by one of her father's trains.
