Pottermore’s latest article from HARRY POTTER author JK Rowling is revealing all the previously unknown details of one of the series’ most disliked characters, Professor Dolores Umbridge!
Rowling’s history digs into the character’s mixed lineage, her squib brother, her rise through the ranks of the Ministry, and more! Readers will see how Umbridge developed into a hateful but also fearful anti-muggle and magical creatures views and how these ultimately became her downfall.
On the consequences of Umbridge’s actions after the final book:
With the fall of Lord Voldemort, Dolores Umbridge was put on trial for her enthusiastic co-operation with his regime, and convicted of the torture, imprisonment and deaths of several people (some of the innocent Muggle-borns she sentenced to Azkaban did not survive their ordeal).
Despite saying in the past that Gileroy Lockhart was her only character fully based on one person, she did have some personal inspirations for Umbridge, including “a teacher or instructor whom I disliked intensely on sight”:
What sticks in my mind is her pronounced taste for twee accessories. I particularly recall a tiny little plastic bow slide, pale lemon in colour that she wore in her short curly hair. I used to stare at that little slide, which would have been appropriate to a girl of three, as though it was some kind of repellent physical growth.
Her obsessive love her fluffy kittens, however, came from a different source:
I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fluffy kitties; she was the most bigoted, spiteful champion of the death penalty with whom it has ever been my misfortune to share a kettle.