Grande Dame

"Why, you're one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen and that's not saying much for you!"

"We are not amused."

— Erroneously attributed to Queen Victoria

The Grande Dame is the stately older woman — usually of wealth and rank, though often enough only wishing to appear so — who is very often a large woman of ample physique, uptight, humorless, and the butt of jokes. The Grande Dame is usually a spinster or widow, in which case she is likely to become an Old Maid or an Abhorrent Admirer; if she is married, it will usually be to a Henpecked Husband (very often an Uncle Pennybags), whom she will drag to operas (where she will also look down on people who wear the wrong style of High-Class Gloves) and ballets because Men Are Uncultured, though she will more often be a patroness of the arts than The Prima Donna herself. She will also quite often have some sort of spoilt and pampered (and very often overweight) child or pet, a Persian or a Pomeranian or a parrot, on whom the rest of her dependents must dance attendance. In most cases, any attempt at frivolity will draw from her either a frigid stare of disapproval or sheer, blank incomprehension. Nevertheless, she will occasionally turn out to be a sympathetic character as well — very occasionally she will turn out to have a screwball or eccentric streak herself.

As she sinks down toward the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism, she will on uncommon occasions become a Deadpan Snarker, though if she goes too far, she may turn into the Rich Bitch; as she rises toward the idealistic end, she may become the more friendly Maiden Aunt — in very rare cases (like Ellen O'Hara) she may become the saintly Proper Lady. Both extremes are uncommon, however, as in general she preserves the status quo as a Moral Guardian — she may well have started out as an Apron Matron — and her watchword is "Respectability." If she loses this and begins to hit the bottle, there is a good chance she will turn into Lady Drunk.

The trope is most commonly a Comedy Trope, associated particularly with the Comedy of Manners; as such, it serves as a useful device for mocking social pretensions and dates back to the ancient Roman plays of Plautus and Terence, where the Grande Dame appeared as the Matrona. She was not used much in the uninhibited Middle Ages, but made a comeback as the humorless, self-important dueña of the 16th and 17th-century Spanish theater (Small Name, Big Ego Doña Rodríguez is the only one character stupid enough in all the novel to believe that Don Quixote is a real Knight Errant). The prude and bluestocking of the Restoration (such as Molière's Arsinoé and his Précieuses ridicules) and Sentimental comedies (for instance, Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan's The Rivals) also have some affinities with the type, insofar as they made pretensions to virtue and culture.

However, it was only with the Victorian age that the great era of the Grande Dame opened. Here, with her fur stole and her ancestral lorgnette in hand, the Grande Dame quashed social climbers, sought advantageous marriages for her daughters and repelled impossible matches for her sons, and maintained the natural order of Society with frigid hauteur for a good hundred years and more. In England, she was generally in Debrett and was called "Lady" something ("Countess" was a particularly imposing title); in the US, she was one of the Brahmins or the Four Hundred or the FFV and was called "Mrs. Van" Whoozis or Miss Firstname. She will still turn up occasionally, to preside over banquets, and to be aghast at the excesses of Feminism or the Youth movement and to wonder why no young ladies bother to go to the cotillion any more.

Her plot function will usually be as an obstruction to the plans of the protagonist, though she will occasionally convert to his side — more rarely, she may assist from the first.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• In Howl's Moving Castle, the Witch of the Waste acts like this for the first half of the movie, but later on karma bites her in the butt and puts a stop to it.
• A straight example occurs in Meowth’s backstory in Pokémon: The Original Series. Meowth was a stray kitten, taken in by a Persian who was the leader of a group of Meowth street thieves. He fell in love with a Meowth owned by a lady fitting this trope and learned to speak in an effort to impress her. After learning how to speak, Meowth returned to find his crush dumped on the street after her master lost all her money, and she had been taken in by the Persian who took Meowth in earlier and had fallen in love with him. Meowth’s jealousy at this became the reason he grew to hate Persians so much.
• In UQ Holder!, Dana is an enormous woman who dresses in extravagant clothing and calls herself "young and beautiful". She is also an ancient High Daywalker vampire known as "The Witch of the Rift", responsible for training Evangeline and later Touta. While effective, her regiment has odd requirements that seem more focused on aesthetics than anything else, like demanding that immortals strike a pose while regenerating.

Comic Strips

• Used to be a reliable comedic Stock Character in comic papers such as Punch! (whence the page image).

Fan Works

• The Vow of Nudity story “The Butcher’s Basement” involves a villainous dowager who made her fortune through a slaughterhouse chain and attempts to carry herself like this. Unfortunately, her insecurities due to having grown up a commoner turn her into a cruel and vindictive noblewoman, and she develops a reputation for regularly mistreating anyone of lower status than her.
• The Discworld of A.A. Pessimal introduces Joan Sanderson-Reeves, a respectable lady from the upper-middle classes, who has a comfortable career as a teacher, specifically in manners, etiquette, deportment and Domestic Science. She also has a discreet sideline as a freelance unlicenced Assassin specialising in killing people through the medium of tainted food and drink. Tracked down by the Watch and the Guild and sentenced to graduate as a late-entry Licenced Assassin or to die trying^note A different sort of Angel offered by Vetinari, who notes she only murders people whose actions have caused grave upset and offence. Vetinari also sees a potentially useful person, she graduates. At the current point in the timeline, her previous life as a freelance non-Guild killer has been forgiven to the point where she is now Dame Joan, the Deputy Guild Mistress, and a constant source of worry to Lord Downey, who recognises a better poisoner than he is. And she's his Deputy. She also teachers valuable skills to Guild students, who are universally terrified of her.

Films — Animation

• Baylene the Brachiosaurus from Dinosaur appears to act like one of these.
• John's wife Killjoy Margaret from Fantasia 2000.
• The Wardrobe from Beauty and the Beast is a subversion: she looks the part but she's very cheerful and even cracks a slightly ribald joke ("Let's see what I've got in my drawers!") during her first meeting with Belle.
• In Turning Red, Wu is somewhere between this, Evil Matriarch, and a Iron Lady. She's old, very dignified, sets impossibly high standards, and insists absolutely that things be done according to custom. On the other hand, she isn't evil, just rigid and old-fashioned in her view of life. However, she's also surprisingly open-minded: when all the Lee women gather on the astral plane, Wu is the first to acknowledge that Mei has a right to make her own choice about her panda spirit.

Films — Live-Action

• Mrs. Rittenhouse in Animal Crackers, Mrs. Teasdale in Duck Soup, Mrs. Claypool in A Night at the Opera and other similar roles in various The Marx Brothers films were gloriously sustained by Margaret Dumont, who may be considered the Trope Codifier and the best example of this trope.
  • Especially because many reports paint her exactly this way off stage. (But see Real Life, below.)
  • There is also Mrs. Claypool's spiritual successor, Lillian Oglethorpe (Nancy Marchand), in the 1992 remake of A Night at the Opera, Brain Donors.
• Nora Charles' formidable Aunt Katherine in After the Thin Man, who is appalled that Nora has married someone as common as a former detective.
• In the movie Arthur (1981), Arthur's grandmother Martha Bach demands that he marry Susan Johnson or she will cut off all his money.
• Mrs. Hamilton in The Bishop's Wife, a very rich and very haughty widow. Rev. Brougham is hitting her up for funds to build a new cathedral, but Mrs. Hamilton is being difficult, demanding that if it's not built as a gaudy memorial to her late husband, it won't be built at all. The ending reveals that she's really being driven by guilt because she never loved her husband.
• Elizabeth Random, Susan Vance's aunt, in Bringing Up Baby, who displays little tolerance for David Huxtable, but who is eccentric enough to want her own leopard.
• Lady St. Edmund in Disney's Candleshoe is the sympathetic rich widow version; her butler hides the fact that she is an Impoverished Patrician for fear it would break her heart. However, she's Obfuscating Stupidity and is actually a grandmotherly type who's enjoying the game.
• The eponymous Daisy Werthan of Driving Miss Daisy appears to begin the movie as a cynical version of this trope and move over towards the idealistic by the end.
• "Mother" in Disney's The Happiest Millionaire is related to the type.
• The Countess of Trentham, played toward the cynical end of the scale by Dame Maggie Smith in Gosford Park
• "Mother" Baldwin in His Girl Friday is close to this type.
• Judi Dench sometimes seems to have cornered the market in playing a steely and capable version of the type:
  • As Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, the Grandest of Grand Dames, perpetually cloaked in finery and perpetually cutting down any fools foolish enough to enter her orbit with deadpan wit. "But I know something of a woman in a man's position. Yes, by God, I do know about that."^note "Great job, Judi - have all the Oscars." (An air-cannon then fires a torrent of Oscars at her.)
  • Her version of M in the new James Bond films (e.g., Casino Royale (2006)) is downright dangerous:
    Bond: I always thought M was a randomly assigned initial; I had no idea it stood for—
    M: Utter one more syllable and I'll have you killed.
  • And again in the recent film version of The Importance of Being Earnest.
  • And again in Mrs Henderson Presents.
• Mia's grandmother in The Princess Diaries is on the more intelligent end of this trope.
• Mrs. Van Hopper, played by Florence Bates, in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is a full-fledged Rich Bitch.
• Inverted in The Rebel Set by the rich, snobby woman who desperately wants to be a Beatnik.
• Very common in The Three Stooges (often played by Symona Boniface or Bess Flowers), as for instance, "Termites of 1938" in which Muriel Allen (played by Flowers) needs an escort to Alice Preston's dinner party, and her maid mistakenly places a telephone call to Acme Exterminators instead of Acme Escorts; Hilarity Ensues.
• The faded actress Miss Luther in Stage Door — and, indeed, most parts played by Constance Collier.
• In Titanic (1997) Rose's mother is a tragic variation on the character, while "Molly" Brown is a subversion.
• Mrs. Van Hoskins in 1972's What's Up, Doc?.
• The elderly noblewoman who summons the brothers Grimm in Ever After is identified in the end credits as "Grande Dame," though she avoids all of the negative aspects of the trope. Her exact title (or name, for that matter) is unclear, except that she is a direct descendant of the French royal family according to her ending narration.
• The Comtesse de Tournay in The Scarlet Pimpernel is a stiffly dignified old lady.

Literature

• P. G. Wodehouse (very likely under the inspiration of W. S. Gilbert, whose works he adored) and his collection of "aunts" may well claim to be the literary patron saints of this trope, on which for well over sixty years he rang the changes of every possible variation imaginable, from the lovable Aunt Dahlia in Right Ho, Jeeves! to the truly horrible Heloïse, Princess von und zu Dwornitzchek, in Summer Moonshine, a Rich Bitch who is not even funny. Perhaps the most typical is the formidable Lady Constance (she is, of course, the sister of the many-sistered Lord Emsworth in the "Blandings Castle" saga), but the most famous is probably Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha, who "chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth." Aunt Julia in the Ukridge stories is an interesting variation in that she doesn't look the part, being a half-sized kitten-like woman, but she more than qualifies mentally.
• Evelyn Waugh also enjoyed this trope, e.g., Lady Circumference in Decline and Fall.
• Mrs. Proudie, in Anthony Trollope's The Chronicles of Barsetshire, is an example of the social-climbing type.
• In Trollope's Palliser novels: Glencora's aunts, the Countess of Midlothian and the Marchioness of Auld Reekie.
• Helen, Duchess of Denver is a humourless young woman in Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novels; Lady Hermione Creethorpe, in "The Queen's Square," is a more typical elderly example.
• Hector Hugh Munro, aka Saki, was very fond of this type, both in the humourless, unintelligent version (for instance, the mothers in "Morlvera" and "The Schartz-Metterklume Method" and Hortensia, Lady Bevel, in The Watched Pot) and also in its Deadpan Snarker variant (for instance, Lady Caroline Benaresq in The Unbearable Bassington).
• Pretty much the whole female cast of The Picture of Dorian Gray, besides Sybil Vane and her mother, is portrayed in this way.
• Jane Austen features the arrogant Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, who, though she does not seem entirely unaware, is rather humorless.
• Mrs. Van Hopper in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca; du Maurier may have been inspired by her father, George du Maurier, who was fond of portraying the type in his cartoons for the English humour magazine Punch!.
• The Comtesse de Tournay in The Scarlet Pimpernel is a stiffly dignified old lady, implacably opposed to Marguerite — but forced by the Prince Regent to acknowledge her nonetheless.
• Lady Shrapnell in Connie Wills' To Say Nothing of the Dog is a direct allusion to Lady Bracknell.
• William Makepeace Thackeray displayed a number of haughty, humorless old ladies in Vanity Fair — for instance, Miss Pinkerton, Lady Bareacres, and Lady Southdown.
• In Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Lady Alys Vorpatril is an example of the heroic Grande Dame. As chief social mover and shaker of the planet Barrayar, very insistent on Things Being Done Properly and a stickler for Protocol, but definitely on the side of the good guys. Villains tend to disregard her because she has no official political power, only to learn to their regret that she has a lot of behind-the-scenes power, due to the fact that she's been the chief social mover and shaker of Barrayar for thirty years, and as a direct result of this knows everybody.
  Miles: Richars Vorrutyer sat right there and informed me that Lady Alys held no vote in Council. The fact that she has spent more years in the Vorbarr Sultana political scene than all of us here put together seemed to escape him.
• Bujold's The Curse of Chalion has the Dowager Provincara. She's a positive and helpful character, though her intense practicality prevents her from properly understanding the mystical nature of the ills plaguing both Chalion and her own daughter Ista.
• The Queen of England in World War Z is another example of the more heroic version of the character.
• Discworld:
  • Lady Sybil Vimes is the heroic type, though she's a good deal younger than is typical for this trope, and not all that hung up on Respectability either. And her pampered pets are dragons!
  • In Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Nanny claims to be "a grande dame or 'big woman' as we would say here". About the only aspects that apply are the age and, as her translation suggests, the physique. She's also the matriarch (there isn't a patriarch; one book mentions that she's had several husbands, and some of them were even hers) of the Ogg clan, all of whom do her bidding, generally because they're scared to death of her.
  • Lady Keepsake in I Shall Wear Midnight is a rather snobby old harridan who seems rather cruel to her daughter Letitia. Then subverted when she bumps into an old friend from the city, who "lets slip" in public that Lady Keepsake used to be a risqué burlesque dancer. This prompts her to lighten up for the rest of the book.
• Uppah-uppah crust Englishwoman Lady Costanza Lorridale in Little Lord Fauntleroy is the kindlier version of this.
• The Dowager Duchess of Dovedale in The Pink Carnation series.
• Queen Victoria (Vicky), as portrayed by Flashman in the Flashman series of novels by George McDonald Frasier.
• Abundant in the Village Tales series. So far, we've seen the Duke of Taunton's humorless sister-in-law Lady Crispin, who is finally old enough to qualify; Lady Agatha Prothero-Fane ("Cousin Agatha"), who chooses to live "in the wilds beyond Builth Wells to keep an eye on the Royal Welsh Show" and "emerges at intervals to dispense advise, whether one wants it or not"; and the late Caroline, Lady Douty, who did good works in the villages "in such a way as to make virtue more repugnant than vice." And none of them is on the level of Flora, Countess Dowager of Freuchie, in Evensong:
  To Lady Crispin, who is outraged by something her son said regarding her behavior at Lord Crispin's funeral: "He oughtn't to have done anything of the sort. [Lady Crispin feels vindicated, for three seconds, until Lady Freuchie goes on:] What he ought to have done – what I should have done – was to have boxed your ears. You're making a Judy of yourself, Constance: indeed, a complete exhibition. It's beneath contempt."
• Miss Havisham from Great Expectations definitely qualifies; however, she is also completely insane, having deliberately frozen her life around the exact minute and day that her heart was broken. Astonishingly, she still receives the occasional visitor, and her upbringing of Estella certainly qualifies her for this trope.
• The Reverend Mother in Dune. Also the Fremen tribal elderwomen.
• His Only Wife: Aunty Faustina Ganyo is a very powerful and wealthy woman in the village of Ho, Ghana. She pays for the schooling of 50 children and offers feasts that benefit the entire community. She loves to be very generous towards others... as long as they worship her and don’t stand up to her. She orders her sons to get rid of girlfriends she disapproves of.
• Augusta Longbottom and Madame Maxine in the Harry Potter series. Minerva McGonagall would qualify to an extent, if she weren't a teacher and has a wicked sense of humour.
• Small Name, Big Ego Dueña Doña Rodríguez is the only one character stupid enough in all the novel (and In-Universe, in all Spain) to sincerely believe that Don Quixote is a real Knight Errant.
• Jamison Rook's mother in the Castle tie-in novels is referred to as the "Grande Damn".
• The stories in The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie include several examples, as the protagonist moves in posh social circles.
  • Princess Dragomiroff in Murder on the Orient Express would also count.

Live-Action TV

• Our Miss Brooks: Mrs. Grabar in "Madison Country Club". Mr. Conklin intends to squeeze money out of the rich dowager so he can redecorate his office. When she arrives, he plans on staging quite a show of poverty, complete with the staff dressed like hobos. Miss Brooks and company have other plans. Hilarity Ensues.
• Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances is a glorious example of the pretentious social climbing version of this trope, complete with Henpecked Husband Richard.
  • "It's pronounced Bouquet!"
• T'Pau (played by Celia Lovsky), a clan elder in Spock's family in the Star Trek episode, "Amok Time." Unlike other examples here, T'Pau is in no way comic, but rather a deeply commanding figure of respect with unquestioned authority. For instance, she makes sure Kirk does not get into trouble diverting to Vulcan to get Spock for the ceremony.
  • A funnier (but occasionally serious) version in the Next Generation: Lwaxana Troi, daughter of the Fifth House of Betazed, holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed, who spent her visits to the Enterprise sticking her nose into ship's workings in a stately manner, trying to marry off her daughter and flirting with Picard, to his chagrin.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has Lady Sirella, Mistress of the House of Martok, as the Proud Warrior Race version of this trope. A stickler for tradition and protocol, she has veto power over who can marry into the House, and judges non-Klingon Jadzia harshly on her worthiness as a potential wife for Worf.
• Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, on Downton Abbey. Appropriately enough, she is played by an actual Dame, Maggie Smith.
  • Also Martha Levinson, Cora's mother (played by Shirley MacLaine). An American example — specifically, a millionaire dry-goods merchant's widow, with an eye to fashion; the Dowager Countess doesn't care for her one whit. Dame-to-Dame combat ensues.
  • Also Mrs Miranda Pelham, mother of Bertie Pelham, with a particular emphasis on moral propriety. While being the wife of a somewhat impoverished distant cousin of a marquess doesn’t seem to be the greatest basis for this, as it turns out her son was next in line for the marquessate and she intends to use her position as mother of the marquess to make the family seat a center of proper virtue.
• On Mad Men:
  • Roger Sterling's first wife Mona in her appearances was an archetypal midcentury "Mrs. Van Whoozis" defending propriety and trying to marry her daughter off.
  • Henry Francis's mother in season 4 is an even more archetypal guardian of Westchester County propriety, to the tremendous annoyance of her step-granddaughter Sally Draper.
• Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development
• Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp had the Duchess, who was part of the evil organization CHUMP.
• Delenn in her widowhood in Babylon 5. Notably when she is snarking at would-be revisionist historians.
  • Side note: in the DVD commentary for the episode Interludes and Examinations, as Delenn descends a staircase Bruce Boxleitner says 'here's the Grande Dame'.
• Lady Anavere Damodred in the second season of The Wheel of Time.
• Mrs. Slocombe of Are You Being Served? attempted to affect this demeanor, but she almost always backslid to her working-class roots in language and attitude when angry or upset.
• In NCIS Shada, the mother of Mike Franks's daughter in law, is an Arab style Grande Dame who ruled her tribe after all the men had died in battle. She carries a ferocious and atavistic air to her and no one would ever want to mess with her except Mike Franks.
• Lavinia Cremone in Dancing on the Edge.
• Evelyn Harper from Two and a Half Men has shades of this (she certainly seems to think of herself as this).
• Diana Rigg as Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. There are shades of this in the book, but it's Rigg's performance (which has been repeatedly compared to Dame Maggie Smith's aforementioned turn as the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey) that brings the character definitively into this trope, though she is not humorless.
• Diana Rigg embraces conservative Grande Dame-dom as the Duchess of Buccleuch in Victoria — quite the feat in a series set in the court of Queen Victoria. (In this one, she's The Comically Serious.)
• Margaret Tilden, owner of the Washington Herald in House of Cards (US) gives every indication of being the prim and proper Grande Dame, until that joke.
• Call the Midwife: Being set in 1950s-60s Britain, these make the occasional appearance:
  • Lady Fortescue-Cholmondeley-Browne, Chummy's mother, is the spitting image of a Grande Dame of the last era of their dominance. Made even more typical by virtue of being married to a former India Office official (Chummy was born there, and apparently the only lullabies she knows are in Hindi!) and very religious to boot.
  • There are moments when Sister Monica Joan (who was clearly born to a wealthy family) gives every indication she would be a Grande Dame were she not a nun in an order that puts God Before Dogma — particularly when she complains about food ("And we are faced with ginger nuts again! Ginger nuts!" "I cannot excite myself about a fatless sponge."). Oh, and she is increasingly senile, but that's another matter...
• Peggy's landlady in Agent Carter is a very mannered, genteel older lady who has no compunctions about imposing her notions of propriety and respectability on her female tenants — enforced through eviction if necessary.
• Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: Phryne's Aunt Prudence is a stout, elderly society lady of considerable means. A pillar of Melbourne Society, she's quite prim and reputation-conscious, but often reveals herself to be kind-hearted and an outright Mama Bear whenever children or the disadvantaged are involved — public opinion doesn't stop her from taking in a destitute girl who'd gotten pregnant out of wedlock when the need arises.
• The Gilded Age revels in this trope:
  • Agnes van Rhijn (née Brook) is a literal "Mrs. van Whoozis" (her late husband being a scion of an old Dutch dynasty) and an ardent and imperious defender of "Old" New York propriety. She strictly regulates (and regularly intervenes in) her family's social relations. Well, her female family's — she has absolutely no control over her son Oscar, who seems to be the only person in New York who doesn't care what she thinks about him.
  • Mrs. van Rhijn's new neighbor Bertha Russell, while definitely "New" New York and a frightful social climber, has cultivated the air of imperious propriety almost perfectly. One does not simply stand in her way. However, she is clearly still a bit rough around the edges, given her willingness to use her husband's immense wealth and power to substitute for her lack of social standing.
  • Several historical grandes dames of the Four Hundred make appearances; Caroline Astor and Mamie Fish in particular are recurring characters.
  • Peggy Scott's mother Dorothy is mostly shown as a kindly mother to her daughter, but her Proper Lady tendencies and age shade into the 19th-century Black version of this. (It seems Julian Fellowes cannot resist writing an older well-off woman without imparting some grande dame tendencies.)

Tabletop Games

• Mrs. Peacock in Clue(do).

Theater

• The matrona parts in the plays of the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence (possibly taken from the Greek Menander) are the Ur-Example of this trope, which may ultimately have been suggested by the goddess Hera/Juno. The character as developed certainly seems more Roman than Greek.
• As a natural corollary of the previous entry, "Domina" of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a direct adaptation of the Roman original.
• Thomas William Robertson's "epoch-making" (according to George Bernard Shaw) play Caste appeared in 1867, featuring the character of the Marquise de St. Maur, who forbids the marriage of her son to the lower-class heroine.
• Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was extremely fond of this type, as, for instance Lady Sangazure in The Sorcerer, Lady Jane in Patience, Lady Blanche in Princess Ida, Katisha in The Mikado, and the Duchess of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers.
• Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the grandest — and one of the dame-dest. Subverted in that she has common origins and married up.
  Lady Bracknell: But I do not approve of mercenary marriages. When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind. But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way.
• Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn in The Music Man, and most other parts played by Hermione Gingold, including Mrs. Bennet in First Impressions, a musical version of Pride and Prejudice.
• Parthenia Hawks in Show Boat (played on-stage by Edna May Oliver and in film by Helen Westley and Agnes Moorehead)
• Miss Jones, Mr. Biggly's secretary in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, has some affinities with the type.
• Baba the Turk in The Rake's Progress is one of the few Grande Dames with a beard.
• The Countess de Lage in The Women.
• Madame Pernelle in Molière's Tartuffe, as well as Arsinoé in his The Misanthrope, as mentioned above.
• Albert Herring has Lady Billows, a fiercely Puritanical and exacting old solon who sings in florid Handelian coloratura.
• Marya Dmitriyevna Ahkrosimova from Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. The lyrics of the prologue even say so!

Video Games

• Kebabu in The Magic of Scheherazade tests your moral fiber by asking if you'd pick up a girl in a hamburger shop.
• Dowager Lady Mantillon in the Dragon Age series is basically the shadowy puppetmaster behind all things in the Orlesian Empire. She is an elderly noble lady, a former mistress of the late Emperor (whom she is rumored to have had assassinated and replaced with his niece), and only those who have her favor can ever hope to rise to the highest ranks of the modern Orlesian society.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Madame Aroma from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is a benevolent example. Though her husband Dotour is the mayor of Clock Town, she is the one who organizes the festivities scheduled for the Carnival of Time and is implied to have more power over the town's committee members than him.
  • The Big Bad of The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes is Lady Maud, the witch of the Drablands who cursed Princess Styla into a leotard that she's unable to remove. When you meet her about halfway through the game, you find out that she's not a stereotypical Wicked Witch, but a smug Action Fashionista who looks to be in her sixties or seventies, but still considers herself nothing less than the pinnacle of the sartorial world — and she dresses the part, too!
• Madame Broode from Super Mario Odyssey is a rabbit-flavored version of this trope, seeing as how she's a massively tall and obese woman who wears a fancy dress and hat, is the fearsome head of a violent wedding planner firm, and has a cutesy-named "Chain Chompikins" that she sics on Mario for annoying her.

Web Comics

• Cecania's mother from Sore Thumbs is well on her way to becoming Lady Drunk.
• In possibly the most hilariously entertaining subversion in all of TV Tropedom, Girl Genius presents, starring in this role ... Mamma Gkika.

Western Animation

• Elizabeth II was depicted in this manner once on Animaniacs:
  Queen Elizabeth II: We are not amused.
  Yakko, Wakko, and Dot: But we are!
• In several Classic Disney Shorts, Madame Clara Cluck (herself a parody of noted operatic contralto Dame Clara Butt) was able to pullet off.
• Lady Richington from Sheep in the Big City, whose catchphrase is "Well, I never...!" is a Grande Dame.
• A recurring character displaying most of the classic characteristics of the type appears on The Simpsons; Martha Quimby and Lady Bouvier also show similarities to this type. Krusty identified her as the "Wealthy Dowager" in the Clown College episode:
  Krusty: Now! When the wealthy dowager comes in, the party's over, right? Wrong!
  (Krusty throws a pie in her face so hard she gets embedded in the wall)
  Homer: (taking notes) ...Kill...wealthy...dowager...
• Eleanor Sherman from The Critic
• Tiny Toon Adventures:
  • One appeared in the episode "Best of Buster", in the segment "Compromising Principals", as the principal of Miss Conduct's Advanced School of Immaculate Manners, assessing the performance and good behavior of students in the Acme Looniversity to determine whether or not Yosemite Sam can transfer to become Vice Principal of her school. Babs, Buster, and Plucky try everything they can to mess up the Grande Dame's examinations beneath Yosemite Sam's notice, often leading to Amusing Injuries for the unwitting mustached man. The abuses continue up until they Body Swap her with a potato, breaking her composure and causing Sam to lose the promotion he so desired.
  • In the episode "New Class Day", the segment "A Night in Kokomo" is a Marx Brothers pastiche, in which a similar character design is used for Ms. Writtenhouse, the Margaret Dumont character.
• Mrs. Astor from Futurama. Even nitroglycerine is intimidated by her.
  Zoidberg: Where's the exploding?
  Hobsy: One does not explode in Mrs. Astor's face.
• Wormaline Wiggler from Mirthworms.
• In The Flintstones, Pearl Slaghoople (Wilma's mother) likes to think of herself as one of these, but as far as Fred is concerned, she's just another "battle axe" mother-in-law that often appears in sitcoms of the time.

Real Life

• Socialist Liverpudlian MP Elizabeth Margaret ("Battling Bessie") Braddock (who bore a striking resemblance to the page picture) was the heroine of a famous passage-of-arms with Deadpan Snarker Winston Churchill:
  Bessie Braddock: Winston, you are drunk, and what's more, you are disgustingly drunk.
  Winston Churchill: Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what's more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.
  • This exchange was confirmed to Richard Langworth by Ronald Golding, a bodyguard present on the occasion as Churchill was leaving the House of Commons in 1946. (Note that in the 1934 movie It's a Gift, W. C. Fields' character, when told he is drunk, responds, "Yeah, and you're crazy. But I'll be sober tomorrow and you'll be crazy the rest of your life.")
• The actresses Florence Bates◊, Symona Boniface◊, Constance Collier◊, Gladys Cooper◊, Marie Dressler◊, Margaret Dumont◊, Edith Evans, Hermione Gingold, Edna May Oliver◊, and Helen Westley◊ specialized in this sort of role, but in most cases the actresses themselves were noted for having a keen sense of humor.
  • It was claimed by Groucho Marx throughout most of their lives that Margaret Dumont never understood what was supposed to be funny about the The Marx Brothers' comedy; however, Dumont was a long-time veteran of the comedy stage herself, and well understood that the more unamused she herself seemed, the funnier the jokes would be for the audience.
  • Margaret had married a millionaire and was this in real life. She commuted to the studio by air from her mansions in Palm Springs and Paris (back when air travel was for the very rich only).
• Queen Victoria is generally portrayed this way. The page quote is said (on rather slim evidence) to have been provoked by the Hon. Alexander Grantham ("Alick") Yorke, one of her grooms-in-waiting, who had a reputation as a funny man among the Queen's retainers, and, when commanded by Her Majesty to demonstrate, either told a risqué anecdote or performed an imitation of Victoria herself. Queens Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, and other queens such as Catherine the Great, are also occasionally depicted in this manner, with rather less justification.^note Namely, Elizabeth I was very savvy and was known to be cool with Shakespeare's bawdy sense of humour; Elizabeth II, although the very model of propriety, is also the very model of the Cool Old Lady; and Catherine the Great was...well...she was Catherine the Great. Read her page.
  • According to someone who was there, it was a risqué-bordering-on-crude anecdote told in a roomful of prepubescent girls. Victoria had good cause not to be amused.
  • Incidentally, there are more photographs of Queen Victoria laughing than there are of all nine of her children laughing combined. She could, however, be a Grande Dame when necessary; her genius was knowing when that was.
• Bertrand Russell's parents died young, and he was raised by his grandfather and grandmother, the Earl and Countess Russell. Because the Earl was near death and died two years after Bertrand's parents, he spent the longest time under the rule of his grandmother, who, although quite broadminded and indulgent, was also famously formidable and insisted — against her deceased son's wishes — on raising the children as devout Presbyterians. (It didn't stick.)
• Among some tribal societies in the rural Philippines, women have a traditional role as clan diplomats. Naturally one who gains a great reputation in this field would be considered a Grande Dame and would likely act like it.
• Frederika "Marm"/"Old Mother" Mandlebaum was an approximately 6'/1.83M, 250lb/114.4KG German immigrant who spoke only when absolutely necessary, dressed simply (except for her hats), and whose mantra was "it takes brains to be a real lady". Starting out as a peddler sometimes making only $6 a week, during the Panic of 1857 she began building a criminal network of theives and pickpockets acting as a fence through which much of the stolen property of late 1800s New York would eventually pass. In the end, it's estimated that she handled somewhere between $1M and $5M worth of goods at the time which is equivalent to about $23M - $118M in 2022.

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