Wilhelmina Slater is by far one of the best characters on Ugly Betty. Played by former supermodel Vanessa Williams, she absolutely knocked it out of the park. Her character is so beautifully written and portrayed, and she and Rebecca Romijn really proved that models could definitely act and carry genuinely great storylines. The quasi-villain of essentially the entire series, she’ll never be quite forgotten.
When the series starts, she’s the creative director, or something along those lines, at Mode magazine, and with the death of her boss, Faye Sommers, she’s the heir apparent to editor-in-chief. That is until company owner Bradford Meade decides to hand the job to his young son Daniel instead, in some attempt to make a man out of him. So, much like Frank Underwood in House of Cards, she claws her way toward the top, or burns the whole house down if she can’t be queen.
She had incredible chemistry with her assistant, Marc St. James. He was just kind of ordinary, everyday terrible, but she was willing to do almost anything. It got to the point where Marc genuinely thought she was trying to kill him, convinced that some mysterious stranger who showed up was actually a hitman sent after him.
After Alexis eventually sides with her own father, it leaves Wilhelmina out in the cold at Mode magazine. So she sets her sights on seducing Bradford, and it actually works, with him leaving his wife, Claire. She becomes engaged to him and nearly marries him. Then she steals his DNA from his corpse so she can arrange for a surrogate baby and claim a piece of the Meade empire in her child’s name. Wilhelmina really was like a cockroach you just couldn’t squash, because she should have been fired at least five separate times and somehow always kept her job security like a tenured professor.
She goes through a lot, even finding love, but her new boyfriend, Connor, turns out to be a criminal who tries to steal the Meade family fortune, and mostly succeeds. Even after her surrogate child turns out to belong to Christina, she still holds onto her spot at Mode. And at the very end of the series, Daniel steps down and she finally gets her wish of becoming sole editor-in-chief. I was fairly satisfied with it, even though it felt a little anticlimactic.