Tear Jerker / The Phantom of the Opera (1990)

• The first scene is of Carriere learning that he's been dismissed. Just his slumped shoulders and broken demeanor...
• Christine gets a minor one at the beginning. After learning that Carriere has been dismissed, she is surrounded by a bunch of girls who ask if the Count de Chagny sent her for lessons. When she innocently asks if they're his friends, they all show his portrait. The realization that her childhood friend has turned into The Casanova sinks in and she looks broken.
• Christine faints after seeing Erik's face, after repeatedly assuring him that she loves him too much to care how he looks. He lets out an agonizing howl of anguish, "WHY?!" and breaks down sobbing.
• This gets a Meaningful Echo at the end, when he's dying. She removes his mask over his feeble protests and kisses him gently, showing that as she said before, she loves him too much to care about his appearance. This time, he utters a tearful, grateful, "Oh, Christine. . ."—-and dies in his father's arms.
• Carriere tells Christine the story of Erik's birth and reveals he is Erik's father. It's shown how Erik's mother died in child birth and Carriere never showed her Erik's face, letting her die thinking she had given birth to a beautiful boy. Carriere thus raised Erik, letting him think he was "some sort of uncle."
  • Later on, Carriere tries to talk Erik out of his homicidal plans by revealing himself as his father. Erik simply smiles that he wondered when Carriere was going to say it.
  Erik: My eyes are the only part of my face I can look at in a mirror without wanting to break the glass. But they're not her eyes...they're yours.
• Richard White's performance as Erik in the musical version of this series (a decent bootleg of which can be found on YouTube) is especially heartbreaking. Though the show mostly follows the same plot as the series, some soul-crushing changes include:
  • Christine does not faint after seeing Erik's face in this version, but rather is overcome by horrified revulsion and runs away in terror, unable to stand the sight. When she screams Erik collapses and desperately tries to block out the sound, then breaks down completely; screaming in agony, destroying the painted forest he had created, and finally curling in on himself while sobbing. The song which follows this (called 'My Mother Bore Me') is terribly sad in its own right.
  • Unlike the Charles Dance version, in which Erik appears to be dying of some unknown illness, here he is shot by one of the soldiers in the chaos which follows his grief-stricken rampage. He looks and sounds so believably pained during the conversation in which Gerard reveals himself as Erik's father, and even more so later when he begs Gerard to shoot him.
  • As in the miniseries, Erik begs Christine not to take off his mask as he dies. She does so anyway, singing to him and kissing his forehead as he expires.
  • In the 2004 Takarazuka Revue Cosmos Troupe production of this musical, Christine kisses Erik's deformed cheek as he dies in her arms and the way he smiles at her in overwhelmed adoration and gratitude in the following moments is enough to bring tears to anyone's eyes.