Mrs. Winterbourne
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| Mrs. Winterbourne | |
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 The movie cover for Mrs. Winterbourne. |
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| Directed by | Richard Benjamin |
| Produced by | Ross Canter Oren Koules Dale Pollock |
| Written by | Cornell Woolrich Phoef Sutton Lisa-Maria Radano |
| Starring | Shirley MacLaine Brendan Fraser Ricki Lake |
| Music by | Patrick Doyle |
| Distributed by | TriStar Pictures |
| Release date(s) | April 19, 1996 |
| Running time | 105 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $25,000,000 (estimated) |
| IMDb profile | |
Mrs. Winterbourne is a 1996 romantic comedy/drama starring Shirley MacLaine, Ricki Lake, and Brendan Fraser. This movie is loosely based on the Cornell Woolrich novel I Married A Dead Man, which has already been filmed in Hollywood as No Man of Her Own (1950) starring Barbara Stanwyck.
[edit] Plot Synopsis
The premise of the film regards Connie Doyle (Lake), a down-on-her-luck new mother who, in a seemingly incredible stroke of luck, is mistaken for the widow of a scion (Fraser) of a very wealthy Boston family. Accepted into the family, she and the deceased man's identical twin brother wind up falling in love, but Connie's conscience eats at her, and soon shadows of her true past threaten to bring down the facade.
[edit] Expanded summary
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The plot summary in this article or section is too long or detailed compared to the rest of the article. Please edit the article to focus on discussing the work rather than merely reiterating the plot. |
The movie starts with flashbacks of the early life of Connie Doyle, how she lost her mother, and the dysfunction between her and her father. At age 18, Connie meets Steve Decunzo, a man with less-than-honorable intentions with designs to take advantage of her innocence. She moves in with him, and eventually winds up pregnant with his child but the moment she informs Steve she is pregnant, he kicks her out of the apartment, with the sole purpose of denying his responsibility as the baby's father. Destitute and having nowhere to go, she makes ends meet until one day she has to face the reality of having to spend her first night on the street. She goes to Steve's apartment and asks for his help, but unbeknownst to her, Steve has already moved on romantically, and he refuses to help her out, leaving her to fend for herself. Not knowing what to do, Connie goes to Grand Central Terminal, at a loss as to what she should do. A beggar comes to her, offering words of advice, and at first she rejects his help, but he re-offers his aid. He advises her to go to a shelter where she can spend the night, which she sets off to do, but a large crowd pressing down on her sweep her onto a train and only as the doors close does she realize she's not on the subway ("Hey! This ain't the subway!") and worse, she has no ticket.
When the conductor appears to ask for her ticket, Connie panics and diverts his attention, but the conductor soon returns, demanding her ticket. A young man, Hugh (Fraser) assesses the situation and provides a ticket. He invites her back to his private cabin to sit down. There, she meets Hugh's wife Patricia, who is herself pregnant. Hugh leaves to go find a table in the dining car, leaving Connie and Patricia alone. Bonding over their pregnancies, Patricia shows Connie the baby clothes she has prepared for her baby. It turns out Patricia is the daughter of a banker, who also lost her mother at a very young age. She just married and is coming to America to meet her husband's family, the Winterbournes. Just then, Connie notices the wedding band, and is amazed at the tiny diamonds, admiring it vocally. Patricia finds this amusing and tells Connie to try the ring on. Connie tells her that she has heard it is bad luck to try on another woman's ring, but Patricia insists, dismissing Connie's old wives tales, and removing the ring to give it to Connie but drops it. They both immediately drop to the floor, gasping and crying out to find the ring. At that moment, Hugh returns and humorously assessing the situatin, requests them to join him in the dining car and then leaves. Finding the ring, Patricia and Connie stand, Connie placing the ring on her finger. The ring gets stuck on her finger however, and as she attempts to remove it, the train crashes.
After a period, Connie wakes up in a hospital and to her horror realizes she is no longer pregnant. She asks for her baby, and admires the male child they bring her for a bit until she notices the name tag on the child, identifying him as the child of someone whose name is not her own. Frustrated and disappointed, she calls and rings for the nurse, but in doing so, notices the hospital tag on her own wrist and realizes they have mistaken her for Patricia Winterbourne, the lady she had met on the train, and that they now think she is Hugh Winterbourne's widow. She receives a call from her mother-in-law and she tries to flee, but finds herself "trapped" and as she has nowhere to go, she hesitantly decides to go along with the case of mistaken identity and pose as the new Mrs. Winterbourne.
She goes home and then meets Mrs. Winterbourne (McClaine) and her son Bill. Upon seeing Bill, Connie panics, thinking him to be the man she met on the train but it turns out this is Hugh's identical twin brother Bill. Connie has to deal with the new world the Winterbourne family inhabits and what is expected of her while in it; It is obvious she is very different from the elegant and refined woman they had been expecting. However Connie finally begins to settle in to this world of the upper crust. Bill is wary of Connie, ipups and inconsistencies in her story arousing his suspicious. However, her candor and honesty disarm him and eventually he becomes attracted to her, eventually the two of them falling in love.
During all of this, Connie bonds with Grace, who takes her in as a daughter. Eventually, the combination of guilt from Grace's affection, Bill falling in love with her (he asks her to marry him), and how she feels taking advantage of the Winterbourne's kindness, Connie attempts to flee, making it to the train station. While she is waiting for the train, the Winterbourne's chaffeur, Paco (Sandoval) arrives and covinces her to stop running, telling her she has earned the right to be a Winterbourne. When Paco brings her back home, ambulances outside show the alarm: Grace, with her bad heart, has had another heart attack. Connie, speaking with Grace, finally realizes that, no matter what happens, she cannot take the baby from them and she cannot abandon the family, and so they start organizing the wedding.
As the events unfold and their relationship progresses, Steve reappears in her life and tries to blackmail her, asking her for money. Connie does not bow to his pressure and goes to Steve's hotel room with a gun to scare him off, but she finds he has been killed, shot in the chest. Startled, she stumbles backwards and accidentally fires the gun. Bill jumps into the room, having followed her. They get out of the hotel and talk things through. Connie tells him who she is, which he already knows from his investigations, and he shows he doesn't care about the truth, since he is very much in love with her.
At their wedding day, as they are getting ready in the chapel, the priest arrives to tell them Grace is confessing to Steve Decunzo's murder. When they find her, Paco is trying to cover for Grace, and they all end up confessing to a murder they did not commit, giving different details of the crime scene. They are cleared of any responsibility right away, since it was Steve's lover (The woman who was in the apartment when Connie came to Steve's window the night she was looking for a place to stay) who killed him after he ditched her the same way he did Connie. Relieved, Connie talks to the woman, and asks Bill to provide her with the best lawyer, since she empathizes with the woman's situation.
Grace then askes her who Steve Decunzo was and Connie tells her everything, how she was afraid to because of Grace's bad heart and how afraid she was not having money to provide for her baby. Grace accepts this quietly but lovingly, and shows no regard for this information, as she loves the baby as her grandson, claiming that he in fact will be as soon as Connie and Bill marry.
At the wedding, as the priest asks Patricia if she accepts, she says no, but only because she wants to say that she "Constance Helen Doyle" (not Patricia Winterbourne) accepts Bill as her husband, and so they marry.
