–Gloria
Gloria Von Gouton is an insane actress at the Thorney Towers Home for the Disturbed. She is a fallen actress who suffers from severe mood swings caused by bipolar disorder; when she is standing in the light, she is kind and happy, but when she steps out into the darkness, she becomes jealous and resentful. She is voiced by Roberta Callahan.
Background
Gloria never knew her father, who is implied to have left her and her mother when she was very young. Eventually, her mother's manager/boyfriend convinced her to send Gloria away to a boarding school called Hagatha Home in order to better focus on her own career as an actress.
Hagatha Home was run by a vicious headmistress who trained the girls under her care in the arts of theater, punishing her students with a whip if they made even the slightest mistakes. Amidst constant ridicule, Gloria desperately wished for her mother -whom she still loved dearly- to take her back home, forever waiting for the letters her mother had promised to write to her every day. However, it is implied that her mother's boyfriend/manager deliberately neglected to actually deliver any of them.
As she waited for the letters that would never come, Gloria learned to act well, appearing to have a natural talent for the stage. After years of waiting in vain for her mother to take her home, Gloria managed to leave Hagatha Home and travel throughout Europe, becoming a very successful, famous, sought-after actress. The world fell in love with her superb acting and wherever she performed, theaters were packed with eager fans and spectators. Gloria earned trophies, critical acclaim, and was able to purchase a seaside home, all in the hopes of making her mother proud.
Unfortunately, her mother's own acting career was nowhere near as successful as her daughter's. While Gloria was away for a show, she received news that her mother threw herself from the top of a building to her death. Gloria was so completely devastated to the point of being traumatized, she could no longer act. Critics who came to watch her from around the world both ridiculed and berated her performances, eventually leading to her falling from stardom in disgrace. Gloria, suffering from harsh internal critique and loss of self-confidence, began to develop mood swings so severe that she was committed to a sanitarium.
Psychonauts
Razputin first meets Gloria when he goes down the pathway leading from the old entrance of the Asylum to the small, dried up greenhouse where Gloria spends her days bowing to a bunch of flowerpots laying about with happy faces drawn on them. She is talking to them as if they were her audience, and she had just finished a performance.
Upon entering the greenhouse, there seems to be what looks like a small golden object with a scythe-like blade left at the right side. If Razputin talks to Gloria before retrieving this object, Gloria mistakes him for the new leading male actor, and speculated it was because of her "eternally young" face that she 'kept getting paired with younger male actors'.
However, if Razputin tries to pick up the object, Gloria recognizes the object as her old acting trophy. She questions the boy if he wanted to know how she got it, but once she steps out of the spotlight and into the shadows, Gloria quickly changes from being graceful to suspiciously angry and asks if Razputin wants to steal it because he felt she did not deserve it. Razputin denies doing such a thing, but Gloria nevertheless takes the trophy away from him, and claims that she never had wanted to become famous in the first place; she only wanted to be loved. She then threateningly advances on Razputin with the razor-sharp trophy, which scares him into running away.
Raz decides to enter the theater within her mind to learn the source of her mood swings. When Razputin defeats Gloria's inner critic, Jasper, and his alter-ego, the Phantom, thus helping her with the mood swings and the inner torment that affected her for so long, Gloria happily decides to leave the greenhouse, looking forward to retiring comfortably from her acting career.
After Loboto has been defeated, Gloria meets up with the other inmates on the courtyard and decides to finally move on. The gas valve she opened (thinking it was the water supply) reacted with Boyd's thrown milk bottle Molotov, blowing up the entire Asylum. It is currently unknown if any or all of the inmates actually survived this explosion.
Gloria's Mind
Main article: Gloria's Theater
Quotes
- "Oh, you must be my new leading man!"
Trivia
- Gloria herself doesn't appear in her own mind, and instead, several stage actors (along with her inner muse, Bonita Soleil) act in mental plays that recreate the story of her life.
- If Clairvoyance is used on Gloria, Raz appears as a picture of herself with a pencil, as if asking for an autograph.
Gallery
