Ingenue (stock character)
Encyclopedia : I : IN : ING : Ingenue (stock character)
The Ingenue is a stock character in literature and film and a role type in the theatre, generally a girl or a young woman who is rather innocent and endearing.
Typically, the ingenue is beautiful, gentle, sweet, virginal, and often naïve, in mental or emotional danger rather than physical danger, usually a target of The Cad; she may have mistaken him for The Hero. The vamp is often a foil for the ingenue (or the damsel in distress, for that matter).
In opera and musical theatre, the ingenue is usually sung by a light soprano. The ingenue stereotypically has the fawn-eyed innocence of a child.
Ingenue and ingenuous may also refer to a new actor or actress or one typecast in such roles.
Ingenue Examples
- Mimì in La Bohème
- Liù in Turandot
- Michaëla in Carmen
- Dorothy Gale in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Antonia in Les contes d'Hoffmann
- Madame Butterfly
- Eva St. Clair in Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Nannetta in Falstaff
- Snow White
- Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera
- Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi
- Lakmé
- Jemima in Cats
- Gilda in Rigoletto
- Tatajana in Eugene Onegin
- Cosette in Les Miserables
- Rapunzel
- Lili
- Gretchen in Goethe's Faust
- Many of the paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau depict scenes of ingenues
-->
Actresses known for playing ingenues
- Mary Pickford
- Daryl Hannah
- Lillian Gish
- Mary Philbin
- Marguerite Clark
- Janet Gaynor
- Bessie Love
- Judy Garland
- Sarah Brightman
- Emmy Rossum
- Veerle Casteleyn
- Ileana Cotrubaş
See also
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.