Gwen Hotchkiss

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Gwen Hotchkiss Winthrop is a fictional character on NBC's daytime drama, Passions. Gwen has been played by both Liza Huber (1999-2000; 2002-present) and Natalie Zea (2000-2002).

Contents

[edit] Character history

[edit] Pre-Show

Born in Harmony, Gwen Hotchkiss grew up in a small town outside of Harmony as the only child of Jonathan and Rebecca Hotchkiss. Her father was not subtle in showing his disappointment over the fact that his only child was a girl, and, as a result, Gwen spent most of her life trying to prove to him that she was just as good as the son that he never had.

At the age of twelve, Gwen met Ethan Crane at a mixer that their boarding schools had, and became fast friends, soon boyfriend and girlfriend. They later went on to attend the same prestigious high school, though they attended separate colleges.

[edit] 1999

After Ethan graduated from law school,he returned to Harmony to work for his family's conglomerate, Crane Industries. Ethan thought he would one day take control of the Crane empire. Though Ethan assured her of his love for her, Gwen began to fear that Ethan did not love her the way she loved him and was only marrying her to please their families. Though he eventually proposed marriage after a talk with his aunt, Gwen turned his proposal down, explaining that she wanted him to propose because he was madly in love with her and not because he felt he needed to.

Despite this mutual disappointment, the two did eventually become engaged when Gwen proposed to Ethan and Gwen began planning their wedding.

[edit] 2000

Unfortunately for Gwen, Ethan soon realized he was in love with his mother's assistant and their wedding planner, Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald. Theresa had been in love with Ethan since childhood. Ethan told Gwen on the eve of their wedding and they canceled their nuptials. Gwen was hurt and angry, and vowed revenge on Theresa. She took a baseball bat and attempted to kill the woman and destroyed her home. However, Ethan showed up to save Theresa. Later, Gwen composed herself and proposed that Ethan date both her and Theresa and decide which he of them he truly wanted to marry. She promised she would accept his decision, but all along she felt he would discover that Theresa, from a working class background, would not fit in as a Crane. Ethan chose Theresa and proposed to Theresa at midnight mass. Gwen's mother Rebecca was furious and vowed revenge against Theresa and promised Gwen they would stop the Ethan from marrying Theresa.

[edit] 2001

Gwen's mother Rebecca came to her with a plan to oust Ivy Crane and destroy Theresa in the process by finding something scandalous about Ivy. Gwen agreed to assist in her mother search through Ivy's personal things, looking for anything that could destroy Ivy's marriage. They found the news that Ethan was really Sam Bennett's son and not Julian Crane's, and Rebecca copied the information from Ivy's laptop onto a disc. Theresa had known for months and had been keeping it secret. Gwen reluctantly agreed to Rebecca's plan to reveal the truth about Ethan's paternity by sending the information to a sleazy tabloid, but their plan failed, and Gwen was left guilt-ridden over how she'd hurt Ethan. Ethan still remained with his fiancée, however, and Gwen realized that she had lost Ethan for good and decided to move on with her life.

[edit] 2002

Devastated after Theresa's lies about what happened in Bermuda, where Theresa had become drunk and married Julian Crane, becoming pregnant with his child, Ethan slowly began renewing his friendship with Gwen. On the night that Theresa confessed to Julian's murder, Gwen and Ethan became lovers again, although they were still just friends. After Julian was proven alive and well, Ethan bought an engagement ring for Gwen, but began wavering toward Theresa again.

Realizing that Ethan would choose Theresa again to marry, Gwen decided the time had come for her to get on with her life and accepted a job in New York. However, after learning that she was pregnant, Ethan convinced Gwen that he loved her and wanted to be with his child and her, and she agreed to marry him. The couple was married on December 19, 2002, despite Theresa's attempts to prevent Ethan from marrying Gwen.

[edit] 2003

When Gwen began experiencing problems during her pregnancy, she and Ethan flew to Los Angeles to be under the care of a prenatal specialist, Dr. Abel. Unbeknownst to them, however, Theresa had also flown to LA, unaware of the Winthrops' presence there. While Gwen stayed in the hospital, Ethan unknowingly got into bed with Theresa. As they slept, the two former lovers kissed passionately!

After seeing television footage of Ethan and Theresa kissing on the beach, Gwen's stress level dramatically rose, and she left the hospital to seek revenge. At the Crane apartment, she found Theresa, and the two began to argue. Things became violent when Gwen attempted to murder Theresa again, and she ended up falling and being rendered unconscious. She was rushed to the hospital, where a heartbroken and guilt-ridden Ethan was given a choice - either save his wife, or his unborn child. Though Theresa told him that the Church taught them to save the child, Ethan chose his wife, and Ethan and Gwen's daughter, Sarah, was stillborn on October 8, 2003.

Gwen was devastated to wake up and find her baby dead in a bassinet. After remembering the events that had transpired earlier that night, Gwen attacked Theresa with a bedpan and threw her wedding ring back at Ethan, telling the two that she wanted nothing more to do with them. Ethan and Gwen eventually reconciled, however, after Ethan made a promise on Sarah's coffin that he would never again leave Gwen for Theresa.

Rebecca, meanwhile, began hatching a plan to make Theresa pay for Sarah's death. Engaged to Julian, the father of Theresa's son, Little Ethan, she had her fiancé sue for custody of the boy after calling Child Protection Services on Theresa.

[edit] 2004

Ethan and Gwen were devastated to learn that the fight in LA and Sarah's subsequent stillbirth had rendered Gwen infertile. Desperate to be a mother, Gwen went along with her mother's plan to adopt Little Ethan after Rebecca had used Julian's money to bribe Judge Reilly to declare Theresa an unfit mother. In April they adopted Little Ethan as their son, renaming him Ethan Winthrop Jr. The couple also began making plans to hire a surrogate mother to carry their child for them.

After selecting a woman named Heather Downs to carry their child, Ethan and Gwen believed that nothing could go wrong for them. Theresa, however, proved them wrong when she drugged Heather and locked her in a closet, then had herself implanted with Ethan and Gwen's embryo in an effort to use their child as a means of extortion to regain custody of Little Ethan. Though Ethan and Gwen were furious, they eventually agreed to drop their objection to Theresa's pregnancy only when they discovered that Gwen's eggs were damaged; it was nothing short of a miracle that Theresa was still pregnant. The three then signed a contract as to their intentions for the welfare of the children, and Theresa moved into the mansion for the duration of her pregnancy.

Though Gwen was thrilled to learn that Theresa was carrying twins, that joy turned to sorrow when the doctors discovered that Theresa could not carry both babies to term. Though Theresa initially refused to abort one of the babies, Ethan and Gwen's pleas eventually changed her mind, and agreed to allow the doctors to abort the weaker child, a boy Ethan and Gwen had planned to name Nathan. It was less than a month later, however, that Theresa went into premature labor and on December 2, 2004 gave birth to a baby girl who Theresa named Jane (after Jane Eyre).

Gwen was terrified for her newborn daughter, and was eager to see her in the NICU. However, she was horrified to learn that Theresa had drugged and raped Ethan after mistakenly believing that she had miscarried Ethan and Gwen's child, and that the baby girl's biological mother could have been either Theresa or Gwen. DNA testing showed Ethan and Theresa to be the little girl's biological parents, and Gwen, after a reaction to a sedative an on-call doctor had given her, lost touch with reality and stabbed Theresa in the back with a scalpel.

[edit] 2005

Gwen, despite her insanity, was arrested and sent to jail for attempted murder. Ethan, understanding that his wife was in need of psychiatric assistance, went to Theresa and begged her to drop the charges; she agreed, but changed her mind after finding out that Gwen's attack had left her paralyzed. Gwen remained in jail, where she hallucinated of a life with Ethan and their three children - Sarah, Nathan, and Ashley. Later, after "hearing" her newborn daughter's cries, Gwen cut her wrists with shards of a mirror so that she could be rushed to the hospital and kill Theresa.

At the hospital, Gwen again attacked Theresa for trying to steal her baby and was furious when Theresa declared that Jane was her daughter. Gwen was recaptured, but, after being left alone, she kidnapped Jane and drove to one of the Crane cabins in Ethan's car. Rebecca, desperate to keep her daughter out of jail, arranged to get Gwen and Jane, whom Gwen was referring to as Ashley, onto one of the Crane jets. Unbeknownst to Rebecca, however, that particular Crane jet had been arranged to carry Katherine to a top-secret Crane compound somewhere in the Atlantic.

At the compound, Katherine, Gwen, Jane, and later Fox, who had launched an attempt to rescue Jane, miserably, were held captive by the evil Alistair Crane until Ethan and Theresa arrived to rescue the four. Before leaving, however, Ethan was forced once more to make a choice between the two women, and he again chose Gwen. The six returned to Harmony, where Gwen regained touch with reality. She was saddened, however, to learn that she and Ethan had lost custody of Little Ethan thanks to a loophole in Theresa's surrogacy contract. She wanted Ethan to sue for custody of Jane as they had planned, but Ethan refused, creating a truce between the two women: Theresa would not press charges against Gwen if Ethan and Gwen did not sue for custody of Jane.

Theresa, crazed in her desire to win Ethan back, broke the truce and pressed charges against Gwen, despite Ethan's threats to sue for custody of Jane. Ethan won Gwen's case, however, by proving that his wife had had a reaction to the combination of a sedative given to her by one of the on-call doctors and other medication that she was on, and he and Gwen immediately sued for custody of Jane. The judge, disgusted by the method by which Jane had been conceived, ruled in favor of Ethan and Gwen, and the couple was given temporary custody of the baby.

Ethan, Gwen, and Jane lived somewhat peacefully in the mansion until Theresa allied herself with Alistair and moved in as his guest. The two decided that they would move out of Ethan's childhood home, taking Jane with them, but Alistair refused to allow this, threatening to sever Ethan's contract with Crane Industries and freeze all of their accounts held in Crane-owned banks. The situation grew even more dire when Theresa married Alistair and, upon discovering the magnitude of her foolishness, attempted to kill him by poisoning his guacamole. In a true twist of fate, Ethan wound up ingesting the laced dip instead, and fell into a coma.

Gwen was faced with the most difficult decision of her life when Dr. Russell informed her that Ethan's test results showed that he was in a permanent coma and would never regain consciousness. After locating Ethan's living will, Gwen decided to terminate her husband's life support. Receiving the support of Ethan's family, Gwen prepared to remove Ethan from life support - until she discovered that Theresa, assisted by an unknown man, had kidnapped Ethan. The police found the two at one of the Crane cabins weeks later, and Gwen was horrified to discover that Ethan's half-brother, Noah, and half-sister, Fancy, had aided Theresa in her crime. The three were arrested, and the still-comatose Ethan and Gwen returned to the hospital.

On Christmas Eve, Gwen decided to postpone the removal of Ethan's life support, pointing out that the Christmas season would be miserable for Jane if she had the knowledge that her father had died that time of the year. This choice proved to be the wisest of Gwen's life, for Ethan emerged from his coma that night and was reunited with his wife and daughter at Christmas Eve mass; Alistair had changed Ethan's test results to make his situation appear hopeless.

[edit] 2006

Desperate to escape from Theresa, Ethan requested a transfer at Crane Industries at Gwen's behest, and Julian arranged for Ethan, Gwen, and Jane to move to New Delhi, India. The three were ready to take off when Theresa revealed that Alistair had left her in charge of Crane Industries, and she terminated Ethan's transfer. The Winthrops, penniless after Theresa froze their bank accounts and rescinded their Crane-issued credit cards, moved to the Bed & Breakfast. Ethan began pursuing job opportunities elsewhere, but Theresa had him blackballed, and he was unable to find work.

Gwen, meanwhile, was thrilled when she received a request for an interview with the exclusive Collier & Company. She and Ethan talked things through, and eventually decided that Gwen would end her role as stay-at-home mother and return to the workforce while Ethan would wait out the remainder of his contract with Crane as a stay-at-home father. Gwen went to work for Collier, fascinated by the work there, unaware that Theresa had bribed Mr. Collier to hire her and keep her busy there so that Theresa could move in on Ethan.

Gwen was terrified when Theresa caught up with tabloid editor J.T. Cornell in Rome because she believed that the secret she had been keeping for so long, that it was her and Rebecca that had clued the tabloids off to Ethan's true paternity, would finally come out, but luckily Ethan refused to believe Theresa's claims. Arriving in Rome, Gwen even destroyed Theresa's cell phone to prevent the truth from coming out when Theresa took a photo of her and Cornell talking, and she eventually paid Cornell off to leave Rome. Before Cornell left Rome, to end the deal he told Theresa that it was indeed Ethan not Julian who was Little Ethan's father. Theresa got the DNA results that let Theresa know that it was Ethan. Excited with these news Theresa rushed to tell Ethan.

[edit] Family

[edit] Spouse(s)

[edit] Children

[edit] Parents

[edit] Ancestry

Although only her mother and father have been named on-air, Tabitha once stated that Gwen and Rebecca were from a long line of Osborn women, whom we can only include suffered from many mental illnesses.

[edit] Relationships

[edit] Rivals

[edit] Occupation

  • Business executive.

[edit] Hidden Passions

In the book Hidden Passions, Gwen's grandmother was named Pamela Osburn. Information in the book has not been confirmed on-screen and is not considered to be official since the information seen on the show contradicts much of what was said in the book.

[edit] Trivia

  • Gwen's mother Rebecca slept with Alistair Crane at Julian and Ivy's wedding. This might be a hint that Gwen herself is a Crane and not a Hotchkiss. The writers have never explored this though.


[edit] Source link

[edit] External links

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