Today would have been actress-lawyer Kim McGuire’s 70th birthday. McGuire achieved cinematic infamy for her portrayal of Mona “Hatchet-Face” Malnorowski in John Waters’ 1990 film Cry Baby. With her weird facial expressions and yellow teeth, Hatchet-Face was one of the teenage-rebel girls, who added to her own creepiness with a disturbing tendency to lick her knife blade. The New York Times review of Cry Baby called the character “too frightening to be funny.” Film Comment magazine said McGuire was “an authentic freak posing like crazy as Hatchet-Face.”

Born in New Orleans on December 1, 1955 – which was also the day that Rosa Parks was arrested – Kim McGuire was the daughter of an attorney and followed in her father’s footsteps. She went to UNO, then to Loyola’s law school. In the late 1980s, she decided to put out some feelers for roles in acting and dancing, and that’s when she got a call about a John Waters film. About her portrayal, the Wikipedia entry about her gathered the following comments from various media outlets:

Writing in New York Magazine, David Denby noted the presence of “a startlingly ugly baby tramp, Hatchetface, played, with makeup spread all over her face, by the masochistically courageous Kim McGuire.” Another observer wrote of McGuire, “whose screwed-up face is an object of much bad-taste-flouting hilarity.” Other critics were no less descriptive, and variously described her as “a hideously contorted floozy” (New York Times), “gorgeously grotesque” (Newsweek), “a character with a mug like silly putty with eyes” (The Advocate), and “a sort of junior Margaret Hamilton” (Atlanta Journal Constitution).

After Cry Baby, Kim McGuire had some other minor roles but was back to practicing law by the mid-1990s. She and her husband Gene Piotrowski had the dual misfortunes later of living in New York on 9/11 then in Biloxi, Mississippi when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. The couple co-wrote a book about the latter experience and self-published it with the title Flashback Katrina, 10 Years After in 2015. According to a July 2015 article in Biloxi’s Sun Herald, McGuire worked in Alabama after the storm, acting “as an attorney to help women evacuees in Louisiana and Mississippi who had been victims of domestic violence.” That full-page article, which was about the book, shows a very thin McGuire, who would have been about 60 years old. She died a year later, in September 2016.