Veruca Salt Biography

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Biography Veruca Salt

Veruca Salt
This article is about the fictional character. For the rock group, see Veruca Salt .
Veruca Salt is a fictional character from the Roald Dahl novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the subsequent film adaptations.

Veruca in the novel

Veruca, the only daughter of the wealthy Henry and Angina Salt, regularly exerts petulant behavior in order to get what she desires, and even her parents are not immune to her outbursts. When Veruca demands that she must have a Golden Ticket, her father buys numerous cases of Wonka Bars, and orders his factory workers to put aside their regular duties of peanut-shelling and unwrap the bars. The process lasts three days, all of which Veruca spends complaining that she doesn't have her ticket. When the ticket is finally found, Veruca is "all smiles again." Her father later confesses to Wonka that he knows his daughter is "a bit of a frump," yet says that it's no reason for his daughter to be "burned to a crisp," on the grounds that he and his wife love their daughter very much.

Veruca in the 1971 film

In the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Veruca hails from England (her nationality was never specified in the novel), and her parents are renamed Henry and Henrietta. She complains about her father's staff's inability to find the Golden Ticket "the very first day", and forgoes school until the ticket is found. He pleads with her to give him time, saying that his staff has been working from dawn until dusk for five days straight. Veruca bellows in response, "Make ’em work nights!" In order to expedite the process, Mr. Salt offers a £1 bonus to the first employee who finds the ticket.

Veruca wants to be the first to enter while waiting with the tour group outside Wonka's factory, during which she is wearing one of her personal collection of four mink coats. She is obnoxious and aggressive, as depicted in the novel, in addition to resorting to threats and even physical violence. She shoves, pushes, and hits her father, and does likewise to Violet Beauregarde while both girls are descending the Chocolate Room stairs. This incident aside, she is not completely indifferent, though not entirely amiable, to the other children; she confides to Charlie, "He [1] is absolutely bonkers!" and expresses concern over Violet and Augustus Gloop's separate punishments for disobeying Wonka's orders during the tour.

Veruca's final scene is the Golden Egg Room, where she pleads to her father to buy her one of Wonka's golden egg-laying geese. After Wonka naturally refuses the offer, Veruca goes on a tirade by trashing the room and disturbing the Oompa Loompas' work. She then climbs onto an Eggdicator and is promptly dropped down into the trash incinerator after being rejected as a "bad egg."

Julie Dawn Cole portrayed Veruca in the film. The song "I Want it Now" was recorded on Cole's thirteenth birthday, and Veruca's trashing of the Golden Egg Room required a total of thirty-six takes.

Veruca in the 2005 film

In the 2005 adaptation, Veruca (played by Julia Winter) resides in a palatial mansion in Buckinghamshire. Her repugnant personality is still intact, but it is expressed in a cold and direct manner rather than whiny and loud. Only when she is denied something does the spoiled Veruca completely lose her cool.

Veruca's primary parental figure and factory tour chaperone is once again her father. Even when her parents satisfy her incessant desires, Veruca lacks any sense of gratitude in return. When Mr. Salt proudly presents to her the long-awaited Golden Ticket that took three days for his staff to find, her first response is, "Daddy, I want another pony." Meanwhile, her mother sips martinis in lieu of reacting to her daughter's familiar outbursts.

Along with Mike Teavee, Veruca never actually consumed any Wonka Bars during the ticket search. During the tour, she is the first to spot the Oompa Loompas when the group visits the Chocolate Room. She and Violet pretend to become friends, though both could not care less about the other. After Violet is punished for chewing a prototype gum against Wonka's orders and consequently transformed into a giant blueberry, Mrs. Beauregarde wonders what she'll do with a blueberry for a daughter and how she will compete again. Veruca snidely replies, "You could put her in a county fair."

Veruca's greed finally gets the best of her when she gets her comeuppance for infiltrating Wonka's Nut Sorting Room by getting knocked down a garbage chute along with Mr. Salt. Since the incinerator is broken at the time, they instead leave the factory covered in large amounts of refuse. Her final demand, "Daddy, I want a flying glass elevator," falls on deaf ears; Mr. Salt, rather than catering to her demands, instead scolds Veruca by crossly saying the only thing she will be getting "is a bath, and that's final."

Earlier in the film, Veruca cuts in front of Wonka to introduce herself as he leads the tour group through the factory entrance, and Wonka replies, "I always thought a verruca is a wart you get on the bottom of your foot." Indeed, the term verruca plantaris is Latin for "plantar wart," and is a common British English phrase. Dahl claimed that "Veruca Salt" was the name of a wart medication he once had in his medicine cabinet.

Veruca's Endgame

In the novel, Veruca's comeuppance takes place in Wonka's Nut Sorting Room, which is occupied by worker squirrels. After being denied a squirrel by both Wonka and her mother, Veruca brazenly enters the premises and attempts to take a squirrel anyway. She is immediately engulfed by the creatures, pinned to the floor, rejected as a "bad nut," and hauled into the garbage chute. Both her parents quickly suffer the same fate afterwards.

Her predicament is similar in the 2005 version, minus her mother; the Oompa Loompas instead drop a painting of Mrs. Salt into the chute in order to emphasize that both of Veruca's parents have spoiled her rotten. Mr. Salt, hovering over the chute opening in a vain attempt to spot his daughter, is then knocked in from behind by one of the squirrels. Both Veruca and Mr. Salt are spared immolation along with three weeks' worth of trash on the weekly burning day only because the incinerator is broken.

In the 1971 movie, the squirrels are replaced with geese laying golden eggs. Wonka denies a sale of one of the birds to Veruca, after which she sings her musical solo, "I Want It Now." After then making a mess of the room, she stands atop the eggdicator, which judges her a "bad egg," and sends her plummeting down the garbage chute en route to the furnace. Mr. Salt jumps down into the chute a moment later to try to rescue her. Their ultimate fate is only mentioned at the end of the movie, when Wonka assures Charlie that the four bad children will be returned to their normal, terrible selves, but maybe a bit wiser for the wear.

Veruca Salt song

Veruca's impending doom in the chute is the subject of the novel's poem and the 2005 lyrics, as is the Salts' blame for turning their daughter into a spoiled brat. The 1971 lyrics center on who is to blame for Veruca's avarice, and what can be done to prevent children from suffering a similar fate (and the main words, "brat", "cat", "shame", "blame", "mother" and "father", are psychedelically displayed in Scanimate style). In the novel and first film, the song is performed after Veruca and her parents go into the chute. The 2005 version is sung to an upbeat and psychedelic folk-style melody; Mr. Salt is pushed into the chute after the song ends.

References

External Links



Roald Dahl charactersWilly Wonka charactersChild characters in written fictionChild characters in film

Veruca Salt Marina Hillo


Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veruca Salt
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