Veronica Lake never played a femme fatale, nor did her hair cover her eye

... except in publicity photos, like the one above.
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These are the 2 things everybody apparently believes about her, and if you search for information about her on the net you'll mostly just find endless and mindless repetitions of both of these non-facts. She was the biggest femme fatale of the 40's, with her hair covering her right eye.

I've seen seven of her movies, and she didn't play a femme fatale in any of them. She certainly looks the part, and I suspect to most people that's all they think it means. But a femme fatale is a gorgeous woman who lures a man to his doom, and then (in the true noirs) also suffers a terrible fate herself. She's fatal to both of them. In the neo-noirs (the ones made after the 50s, usually in color) she often doesn't pay for her crimes, she gets off scott-free. But the film code of the time required people who commit crimes to pay. I guess unless they're detectives who bring justice in the end.

After seeing a bunch of her films it suddenly struck me—wait a minute, I thought she was supposed to be a femme fatale? Am I just not seeing the right movies? In all the ones I saw she's a sweet girl who usually helps the doomed protagonist. In I Married a Witch (precursor to the show Bewitched) she wanted to be a femme fatale and she tried, but she accidentally drank the love potion the man was supposed to drink, so she fell in love with him.

There may be a moment or two in some of the films where, if she's leaning forward and the camera is on the right side, her hair might visually cover an eye briefly. But she didn't wear it that way, it just came close to touching the edge of the eye. That was her trademark, and of course the photographers played up on it massively in her photos. It became the trademark for Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But she never did it in any of the movies I've seen.

Sorry, just wanted to get that off my chest. When it occurred to me that she never actually did play a femme fatale, I went searching for corroboration (or for mention of what film I might have missed) and was frustrated by the endless misinformation. I guess the term femme fatale, like film noir, has become a catch-all and most people don't really know what it means.