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Claudia is a five-year-old vampire child created in 1794 by Lestat in New Orleans. With long curly golden hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, she is described as resembling a perfectly painted china doll.
Personality[]
Because she remembers little of her mortal life, Claudia is particularly monstrous as a vampire, not seeing herself as a being with anything in common with humans. Once she ages into adulthood, she becomes particularly resentful of Louis and Lestat, tormented by her conflicting love for them and her hatred of their role in creating her in a eternally childish form. Claudia often insists that they view her as a doll, and insists on her own adulthood, sometimes intentionally to disturb them and make them feel guilty. Due to her separation from humanity, Claudia longs to know more about the origins and purpose of vampires.
Biography[]
Her Mortal Life[]
In 1794, Louis finds a young child grieving over her dead mother's plague-stricken body. Half starved from feeding only on the blood of rats for the past four years, he drinks from her in a frenzy. He is discovered by Lestat, who doesn't hesitate to mock him for his hypocrisy. In his shame, Louis runs off, leaving the girl for dead as Lestat dances madly with her mother's corpse. Concerned citizens bring the girl to a make-shift hospital for orphans of plague victims. Infected with the plague and weak from Louis' feeding, she is delirious, and Lestat, posing as her father, takes her from the hospital.
Upon his return to Rue Royale, Louis is horrified to find Lestat has brought the girl to their home. Despite Louis's objections, Lestat makes the dying young girl into a vampire, naming her Claudia. Being incredibly young when made into an immortal vampire, Claudia remembers very little of her previous life as a mortal girl.
Life as a Vampire[]
For sixty-five years, Claudia, Louis and Lestat live together as a vampire family. Over time, Claudia grows increasingly resentful towards her maker Lestat for trapping her in the body of a little girl, never to be a woman, and for his refusal to tell her and Louis what he knows of the history of their kind. She takes out her frustration by killing the housemaid and her daughter, leaving Louis and Lestat no choice but to kill the housemaid's husband and son who are frantically searching for them. Knowing Lestat will never let her or Louis go, she secretly plots to be rid of him so she and Louis can be free.
One night, she presents as a peace offering to Lestat: two homeless boys. Claudia claims they are drunk from a small amount of wine, when their system is really filled with absinthe and laudanum. While Lestat is weakened and in an impaired state from his feeding on one of the boys, Claudia slashes his throat with a knife and plunges it into his heart. Lestat's blood pours from his body, leaving it exsanguinated. Believing him to be dead, she and Louis dump his body in the swamp.
The night she and Louis are set to sail to Europe, Lestat surprises them at their home, revealing that their attempt to kill him has failed. To stop Lestat in his rage from killing them, Louis sets fire to Rue Royale with Lestat still inside, and he and Claudia flee to Europe.
Claudia and Madeleine.
Initially, the only vampires Claudia and Louis are able to find are mindless blood drinkers who are nothing more than animated corpses. After years of failing to find other vampires like them, they settle in Paris, where Claudia begins dressing and moving like an adult, and commissions a doll maker named Madeleine to make a doll for her in the form of a woman, not a child. She explains to Louis that she no longer wants to move through the world as a child, and taunts him for still seeing her as one. Louis and Claudia meet Armand and his coven at the Théâtre des Vampires, and Claudia is fascinated by the show and becomes a subject of fascination for the vampire theater troupe. Armand is instantly attracted to Louis who does little to discourage him, and Armand telepathically torments Claudia, repeatedly insisting she should die to set Louis free.
After Louis returns from one of his meetings with Armand, he finds that Claudia has brought Madeleine, who is grieving the loss of her young daughter, back to their hotel. Claudia insists Louis turn Madeleine into a vampire companion for her, as Claudia's body is too small to complete the blood exchange required. Following an argument where Claudia insists that Louis owes her this for his involvement in trapping her in the form of a child, Louis ultimately transforms Madeleine into a vampire. Madeleine begins creating doll-sized furniture and clothing for Claudia, building a small miniature world to Claudia's scale in their hotel room.
Louis is reluctant to leave Claudia, despite her now being with Madeleine and his desire to stay with Armand. Claudia asks him to leave Paris with them, but Louis refuses, saying that he loves Armand. Claudia expresses hope that they will one day reconcile, and they fall asleep in each other's arms, before being ambushed and captured by the Théâtre des Vampires.
Having learned from Lestat, who returned to Paris seeking Armand's powerful old vampire blood to help restore his damaged body, about Claudia's murder attempt, the Théâtre des Vampires put her and Louis on trial and sentence Claudia and Madeleine to death for the crime of attempting to kill another vampire. In The Vampire Armand, Armand reveals that after the trial he attempted to attach Claudia's head to Madeleine's body to give her an adult form, but was unsuccessful and reversed the procedure before her death. Claudia and Madeleine are forced into a small courtyard, where they are killed by the light of the rising sun.
Left alone after Claudia's death, Louis pairs with Armand and for years they travel together. Louis never recovers from the death of Claudia and eventually leaves Armand for his involvement. Armand would later reveal that Claudia's fate was sealed the moment her existence was known by his coven because vampires made at such a young age were never permitted to continue to live.
Claudia appears in the form of a hallucination or ghost after her death. In The Queen of the Damned, Jesse Reeves encounters Claudia's ghost in the townhouse on Rue Royale. In The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat sees an apparition of Claudia as a projection of his own guilt, and it taunts him as he is delirious in the hospital after almost dying of exposure in a mortal body. In Merrick, Louis requests the assistance of the witch Merrick Mayfair to summon Claudia's ghost, as he wants to know what has become of her spirit after death. Louis learns from a diary entry Merrick insists he reads before the summoning that Claudia chose to kill Lestat and leave with Louis because she thought Louis would be easier to control, which saddens but does not deter him from attempting to contact her. When Claudia's ghost is summoned, it taunts Louis, saying she hates him and that her soul is trapped in the whirlwind, unable to rest. Though Merrick insists that the ghost may not have been Claudia, Louis appears to believe it may have been.
Inspiration[]
Interview with the Vampire was written shortly after the death of Anne Rice's young daughter Michele from leukemia. Claudia's appearance and mortal age match Michele's, but Anne Rice did not connect the character of Claudia to her daughter until the correlation was pointed out to her by the first readers of her manuscript.
In a Facebook post in 2009[1] commemorating her late daughter's birthday, Anne Rice wrote: "If Claudia's beauty and suffering in Interview with the Vampire is a tribute to Michele, as it surely must have been, well I am at peace with at least that part of the story."
In Adaptations[]
In the 1994 movie adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, Claudia is portrayed by Kirsten Dunst, who was eleven years old at the time. Director Neil Jordan believed a five-year-old was highly unlikely to understand the necessary emotional depth to play a complex character as Claudia, so an older actress was cast instead, and the character's mortal age was changed to eight.
In the musical production of Lestat, Claudia was given two solos: I Want More, her "plea" to Lestat and Louis that she was sick of being a sweet little girl, revealing her hidden desire to hunt, and the somber lament I'll Never Have That Chance, sung when she realizes she will never get to grow up and experience a normal life. Portrayed by Allison Fischer, her performance as Claudia is often regarded as the highlight of the show.
In AMC Television's Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, the character of Claudia was aged up to fourteen, and portrayed by Bailey Bass in season one. Delainey Hayles was cast in the role for season two, after Bass was unable to return.
Gallery[]
