Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina

A celebrated, aging actress, sister of Pyotr Sorin and mother of Konstantin Treplyov, whose married surname (never used onstage) is Treplyova. Vain, tight with money toward her son and her ailing brother's household while generous toward herself and her lover, she treats the theater as a religion and cannot forgive her son's experimental play its implicit rebuke of her own conventional stagecraft, mocking it openly during its performance in Act One. Her possessive, competitive relationship with Treplyov -- alternating real tenderness with cutting cruelty -- runs through the play, sharpened by her ongoing affair with the writer Boris Trigorin, whom she manipulates and flatters to keep at her side even after his infatuation with the young Nina Zarechnaya becomes obvious. She largely refuses to register the damage her choices do to her son, and is present, playing cards with the household, in the play's final moments just before his offstage suicide.