Clarice Starling

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Hannibal Lecter character

Clarice Starling
Gender	Female
Ethnicity	White American
Birth	December 23, 1957
Relationships	Hannibal Lecter (partner) George Starling (father)
Current status:	Alive
Portrayed by:	Jodie Foster (The Silence of the Lambs) Julianne Moore (Hannibal)

Clarice M. Starling is a fictional character in the novels The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal by Thomas Harris.

In the movie adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs she is played by Jodie Foster, while in the movie adaptation of Hannibal she is played by Julianne Moore. (Foster refused to appear in Hannibal unless the ending was changed, and by the time Harris was finished writing the alternate ending, Foster had already moved on to another project.)

Clarice Starling, as portrayed by Jodie Foster, was ranked #6 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains, as a hero.

[edit] The Silence of the Lambs

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Starling is 25 and a student at the FBI Academy. She hopes to work at the Behavioral Science Unit, tracking down serial killers and ultimately apprehending them. In order to gain insight into the minds of serial killers, she is sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist turned cannibalistic serial killer who is housed in a Baltimore mental institution. After a brief conflict with Lecter and a discourteous act toward Starling by another prisoner, Lecter forms a bond with her by offering his professional insights to help catch the serial killer who is known by the name Buffalo Bill. Upon arriving at the asylum for her first interview with Lecter, Starling is the subject of the crude and lewd attentions of Lecter's captor, the asylum manager Frederick Chilton. She rebuffs him, much to his annoyance, which probably helps her bond with Lecter, who also despises Chilton. As time passes, Lecter gives Starling information about Buffalo Bill, but only in exchange for personal information such as painful memories.

She tells Lecter that she was raised in a small town in West Virginia, with her father (a police officer). When she was about nine years old, her father was shot by robbers. He died a month after the incident. Starling was sent to live on a farm with her uncle, from which she briefly ran away in horror when she witnessed horses and lambs being slaughtered. (The title of the book refers to her being haunted by the screaming she heard from the lambs. Starling believes that if she can save people from Buffalo Bill, the screaming will stop).

She spent the rest of her childhood in a Lutheran orphanage. She graduated from the University of Virginia at the top of her class and became a star student of the FBI's training school, attracting the attention of FBI Chief of Behavioural Science Jack Crawford, who had selected her to interview Lecter.

During the investigation, Starling and Lecter form a strange relationship with each other (Lecter gives her clues in the form of cryptic, riddling information designed to help Starling figure it out for herself.) The two grow to respect each other, so when Lecter escapes during a transfer to a state prison in Tennessee, Starling does not fear him, because she is certain that even though as dangerous as he was, he respected her enough to not come after her.

Starling has a hunch that one of Buffalo Bill's victims had a personal relationship with him, and goes to investigate. She goes to the victim's home in Belvedere, Ohio, to interview people who knew her, and unknowingly stumbles onto the killer himself, Jame Gumb (he is living under the alias "Jack Gordon" when they meet). When she sees a Death's Head moth (the same kind that Bill stuffs in his victims' throats) flutter through the house, she knows she has her man and tries to arrest him. Gumb flees and Starling follows him into his basement, where his latest victim is alive and screaming for help. Gumb stalks Starling wearing night vision goggles and is about to kill her when she hears him behind her and opens fire, killing him. The victim is rescued.

Weeks later, Lecter writes Starling a letter from a hotel room somewhere in Detroit wishing her good luck in silencing the screaming of the lambs. (In the film version, he calls her from an unknown tropical location, in which he stalks Chilton, who is on vacation).

[edit] Hannibal

In Hannibal, Starling is aged 32 and a full-fledged FBI agent. After a bungled drug raid leaves Starling suspended from duty, she receives a letter from Lecter, who is (unknown to her at the time) residing in his favorite city: Florence, Italy. One of Lecter's surviving victims, the paralyzed and mutilated vengeful billionaire Mason Verger, is searching for Lecter and has offered a huge reward, which a corrupt Florentine detective named Pazzi tries to claim when he discovers Lecter's true identity in Florence.

Clarice finds out about Lecter in Florence and attempts to warn Pazzi. As Starling predicted, Lecter finds out about the plot that Pazzi has against him, and as a result, he kills Pazzi. Lecter then flees to the US. When he arrives, he stalks Starling, but without homicidal intentions. Starling, meanwhile, is being harassed and chased out of the FBI by various corrupt agents such as her superior Paul Krendler, who is secretly assisting Verger in capturing Lecter. Starling attempts to find Dr. Lecter first, not only to capture him, but to save him from Verger and Krendler. Krendler was also trying to frame Starling by planting falsified letters from Lecter, in an attempt to get her fired by the FBI by making them believe that she and Lecter had an intimate relationship. Lecter is captured by Verger and Verger attempts to feed him to a group of specially trained boars.

Julianne Moore as Starling in Hannibal; Lecter in the background

Starling is aware that Lecter is being held by Verger, so she attempts to save him. She is wounded in the ensuing gunfight; Verger is killed by his own sister, Margot. (However, in the film version, Verger is pushed into the boar pen by his long-sufffering assistant Cordell Doemling.) Lecter nurses Clarice back to health and attempts to transform her into a surrogate for his late sister, Mischa, through a regimen of mind-altering drugs, brainwashing and psychological conditioning.

Lecter utterly underestimates her strong will, however; she mocks Lecter's devotion to his sister and tells him that he should brainwash himself into becoming Mischa if he truly wanted her back. During this time, Lecter captures Krendler and cannibalizes his brain with a drugged Starling. Then, in the novel's most controversial sequence, Clarice opens the front of her dress and offers her breast to Lecter. Lecter accepts Clarice's offer and the two become lovers. They disappear together, only to be sighted in Buenos Aires three years later by Lecter's former orderly, Barney, who somewhat befriended Lecter while he was incarcerated in Baltimore.

The final section of the novel is often interpreted by audiences as Starling's domestication of Lecter, quieting his violent impulses with love. The penultimate paragraph of the book, however, implies that both Starling and Lecter were capable of murder at any time:

"Someday perhaps a cup will come together. Or somewhere Starling will hear a crossbow string and come to some unwilled awakening, if indeed she sleeps. We'll withdraw for now, while they are dancing on the terrace — the wise Barney has already left town and we must follow his example. For either of them to discover us would be fatal."

In the film version of Hannibal, screenwriters Steve Zaillian and David Mamet, with endorsement from Harris, changed the original ending (which Jodie Foster said that she would not act out). The film dismissed the "Mischa" transformation of Starling, and the mutual consumption of Krendler's brain by Lecter and Starling. Instead, Lecter feeds Krendler his own brain while Starling watches in horror and disgust. The film also portrays Starling as trying to apprehend Lecter rather than giving in to him. She calls the police and handcuffs herself to him after he traps her. Lecter threatens to cut off her hand with a meat cleaver unless she releases him, but offers her another way out: he will turn himself in if she tells hims she loves him. She refuses, much as Lecter expected and hoped. He then cuts off his own hand instead and escapes.