False Widow: Difference between revisions

* Mrs. Arbuthnot of [[Oscar Wilde]]'s play ''A Woman of No Importance''.

* Inverted in ''Bounce'': Gwyneth Paltrow's character is a widow but claims to be divorced because she was sick of people pitying her. Since, in her words, "everyone is divorced these days", they don't pity her as much when she tells that lie.

* Another male example: In ''[[Theater/The Rainmaker|The Rainmaker]]'', File falsely claims to be a widower.

* In an episode of ''[[Carnivale]]'', Sophie pretends to be a widow in order to get into bed with a random stranger in town.

* Constance MacKenzie in ''Peyton Place''. She moves away from her small town and has an affair with a married man, who dies shortly after impregnating her with their illegitimate daughter, Allison. Forced by the circumstances to return to said small town, Constance takes the dead lover's name and pretends to be his widow, even altering Allison's birth certificate by one year to make her appear legitimate. Allison has a [[Heroic BSOD]] after learning the truth {{spoiler|(and finding the corpse of her best friend's mother hanging in her bedroom closet)}}.

* In a bizarre twist on this trope, Victor Mancha of the ''[[Runaways]]'' comic books thinks that his dad was a marine who died in the first Gulf War. It turns out that {{spoiler|he never had a dad in the traditional sense at all--Victor is a cyborg created by the evil robot Ultron using his mother's DNA.}}

 

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