Karen Walker (née Delaney; formerly St. Croix, Popeil, and Finster) is a fictional character on the American television sitcom Will & Grace, portrayed by Megan Mullally. Although Karen was originally conceived as a supporting character role for Will & Grace, her escapades became a more prominent part of the show due to the popularity of the character with the audience. She was a multi-millionaire thanks to her marriage to Stanley Walker (an unseen character), until it was discovered that all of his money was loaned after their divorce in the series finale. However, at the end of the series, she regains this status.
The 2017 revival of the series retconned that revelation as one of Karen's daydreams; she is still rich and still married to Stan. However, in the tenth season, Karen and Stan go through another divorce after she is caught cheating on him with his friend, a government agent by the name of Malcolm Widmark (Alec Baldwin), and she struggles with her loneliness and erratic emotions.
Karen has been described by Grace Adler (Debra Messing) as "a spoiled, shrill, gold-digging socialite who would sooner chew off her own foot than do an honest day's work." She is also a promiscuous alcoholic/drug addict with an often tenuous grip on reality and very few morals. She’s best friends with Will Truman’s (Eric McCormack) equally narcissistic friend Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes). After Mullally spoke her lines in her normal speaking voice in the pilot, she increased her delivery in pitch in subsequent episodes until her distinct nasal voice became one of the character's trademarks. In 2010, Karen Walker was ranked No. 23 on the TV Guide Network special 25 Greatest TV Characters of All Time.
Fictional character history
Early years Karen Delaney was born on January 12, 1959 (which is revealed in the show's season 8). She had a difficult childhood, thanks in part to her unstable relationship with her mother, Lois Whitley (Suzanne Pleshette), a con artist who incorporated her young daughter into her schemes. Karen has made many references in the show to her education and her maiden name, Delaney, which suggest she is of Irish-American background.
Although she tries to keep her age a secret, Jack revealed that she was 42 in 2001, meaning she was born in January 1959. She has been married four times – her first husband's surname was St. Croix, her second husband was named Popeil (a reference to the American culinary businessman/entrepreneur Ron Popeil), her third was Stan Walker (married since 1995), and she was married for less than a day to Lyle Finster (John Cleese) in May 2004. As of the end of the series, she is still married to Stanley (see below), who has two children of his own, Olivia and Mason. She has intimated an illicit relationship with Ronald Reagan. Karen also goes under the alias "Anastasia Beaverhausen" ("Anastasia as in Russian royalty, Beaverhausen as in ... where the beaver live") and also once used the alias Pilar Palabundar to "beat up businessmen for cash in Chinatown." Fans of the Beaverhausen have created several interesting social media profiles, further fictionalizing both the alias character Anastasia and creating relatives. One of the more prominent iterations is Alexander Beaverhausen, who is a photographer in Dallas. Living a luxury life in Dallas but has strayed away from Anastasia.
Another alias was Lupita, used when she had an affair with a hotel janitor while trying to pass as a maid using Rosario's uniform. Her real name may not, in fact, be Karen, as she changes her name from time to time to "throw off the Feds." Her mother refers to her as "Kiki", which was her childhood nickname. She has made more than one reference to attending Sarah Lawrence College. She is noted also for her shrill, squeaky voice; in one episode in the third season, Karen inhales helium from a balloon, only for the gas to have absolutely no effect on her voice. She is also noted for her addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs.
Karen seems to have had a background in acting (including a performance in a soft-core adult film as a naughty maid); however, she vowed never to act again after her part as a bank teller in the TV show Mama's Family was cut. (Her one line was: "Would you like that in fives, tens, or fifteens?" delivered in a Southern accent). She has also spoken of a two-episode character arc in Dynasty.
Karen tends to have trouble separating stories she has read, seen, or heard about with her actual life. On one occasion she explains that she loves her family and then recites the story of Heidi, claiming it as her own. Another situation involves Karen's fear of elevators: she and Jack are walking up the stairs of a skyscraper because she refuses to use the elevator. Jack asks her why she's afraid of elevators, and she recounts the opening scene of the movie Speed (1994). She has also described the events of Norma Rae (1979) and To Sir, with Love (1967) as her own life experiences.
Overview
Connection to other characters To entertain herself, Karen takes a job as personal assistant to interior designer Grace Adler. Though she rarely accomplishes any work, she keeps the job because it keeps her "away from Stan and the kids", as she once told an intern. Karen actually quits Grace Adler Designs twice. First, when Grace found Karen in a dominatrix film and Karen was horribly embarrassed, and second, when Karen does a design job all on her own and Grace takes credit for it. In the first instance, Karen returned to the company at the end of the episode because Grace gave her 49 copies of the film (Grace keeps one—totaling 50) so "no one would have to see the tape again." The second time, Karen returned in the next episode. She becomes Jack's assistant at "Out TV", but she gets fired because she and Jack couldn't keep a professional relationship, and she then returned to Grace like "nothing ever happened", even though she remarks, "I missed you".
Despite her incompetence, Grace never fires her because of the business benefits from Karen's social contacts; Karen also pays for Grace's health insurance and Christmas bonus. For a long time, Karen never cashed any of the paychecks she was given because, being rich, she didn't need to; also, Karen and Grace had made a deal that, in exchange for not cashing the checks, Karen was not required to actually do any work. Instead, she kept them in a shoe box on her desk because she thought they were "pretty little blue pieces of paper." In one episode, when Stan cuts down on her extravagant spending habits, she cashes all her paychecks at once, nearly bankrupting Grace. Karen gives the money back to Grace in the end.
Karen and Grace are very close friends, despite Karen's constant criticisms and insults regarding Grace's clothing choices and personal life (often dismissing Grace's wardrobe with the comment "Honey, what is this? What's going on here?" What are we trying to say?"). Karen and Grace's best friend Will Truman initially dislike each other, but they gradually become friends as well. Through Grace, she also meets Jack McFarland, and they become inseparable best friends.
Karen's home life For the first few seasons of the show, Karen lives with husband Stan Walker. Karen met Stan Walker in 1985, brushing off three simultaneous relationships (with Martina Navratilova, Sultan Habibi Shoshani Padush Al-Kabir, and a man named Clayton) to be with him, only to learn that Stan was married. After going through two other marriages, she finally got together with Stan 10 years later. At some point before this, she also agreed to appear in the fetishistic simply film Next to Godliness, a dominatrix flick. Stan is an obese man who was credited with keeping Taco Bell and Pizza Hut in business, and who has worn a toupee since his teens.
Stan was a mostly unseen character during the show's run, despite being mentioned in many episodes. His hands and legs were shown in the episode "New Will City" but his face never was shown. His two children by his first wife, Mason (whom Karen calls "the fat one") and Olivia ("the girl"), were often left in Karen's incompetent care.
In the fourth season, Stan is jailed for tax evasion and tells Karen to date other men. She cannot bring herself to do so until she meets rich bachelor Lionel Banks (Rip Torn), but just as their affair begins, Stan is released from jail. However, after Karen catches Stan with his mistress, Lorraine Finster (Minnie Driver), a cafeteria worker at the prison, the couple separate and Karen moves into the Palace hotel. After beginning divorce proceedings at the end of the fifth season, Stan dies suddenly. Despite cruelly mocking him for years, Karen is genuinely saddened by his death.
During season six, Karen pursues romantic liaisons and eventually marries Lyle Finster (John Cleese), Lorraine's father. However, after 20 minutes of marriage, she asks for a divorce upon realizing that Lyle puts his own needs ahead of hers.
Karen becomes the head of Walker, Inc. upon Stan's death. However, at the end of season seven, it is revealed that Stan faked his death and had actually been in hiding. Karen begins dating Malcolm (Alec Baldwin), a government agent who had helped Stan go underground. However, she ultimately reconciles with Stan, and Malcolm leaves on a government mission to Sri Lanka. But later in the eighth season, Karen and Stan experience significant marital difficulties. They finally choose to divorce, only for Karen to learn in season eight's finale that his money is borrowed, so she is now broke.
Karen then pressures Jack into a relationship with Beverley Leslie (played by Leslie Jordan), who is wealthy enough to support Jack—and in turn keep Karen in the extravagant lifestyle to which she is accustomed. Though he is not attracted to Beverley, Jack goes ahead with the scheme because Karen had financially supported him for the whole of their relationship. Karen realizes that she is doing to Jack what her mother did to her, and tells him that she cares more about his happiness than the money. Beverley, who had been in the bathroom, then comes out to an empty bedroom, looks for Jack on the outside balcony and, being 4'11 and 100 lbs., is swept to his death by a gust of wind. Beverley had left his $100 million estate to Jack. He happily becomes the provider in his relationship with Karen, which has otherwise not changed. The series finale shows that—until at least 2028—Karen, Jack, and Rosario share an extravagant penthouse apartment together, and, thanks to plastic surgery, Karen appears to have not aged a day.
When the series was revived in 2017, however, the events of the finale were written off as one of Karen's drug-induced hallucinations. In this continuity, Karen is still married to Stan and still independently wealthy, and has become a member of First Lady Melania Trump's inner circle.