Lady Lysa Tully

• Individual Picture Notes
  • Kate Dickie as Lysa Tully in HBO Game of Thrones

• General Notes
  • 
    The younger of Lord Tully’s two daughters, Lysa was pretty and full of hope as young woman, when she was wed to the much older Lord Jon Arryn to seal an alliance against the Targaryens during Robert’s rebellion. Her hopes came to nothing, as she had multiple miscarriages and found life with the elderly Lord Arryn—old enough to be her grandfather—difficult. She did finally have one child, the sickly boy Robin Arryn, and is now Lady of the Aerie.
    
    Her crowning glory is her auburn hair, which she keeps long.  However, she has grown stout and florid over the years and through her disappointments. She has a flighty and perhaps paranoid disposition, and she is rarely able to keep her emotions in check.
    
    Lysa Tully was secretly in love with her father's ward Petyr Baelish, who had deflowered and impregnated her when they were young.  Hoster Tully was enraged when he learned of it and sent Baelish back to his own desolate home. He had Lysa's child aborted, though he later used its existence as proof of Lysa's fertility when wedding her to Jon Arryn.
    
    As the Lady Regent of the Vale, Lysa maintained a strict neutrality in the War of the Five Kings, failing to call her banners and send aid to her sister's son, Robb Stark, and to her father, Hoster Tully, though her posture rankled many of her vassals.  She also was unresponsive to the threat posed by the increasingly active and hostile tribes of mountain men.
    
    It was her decision to try Tyrion Lannister and allow him a trial by combat via a chosen champion, which allowed Tyrion to escape Catelyn Stark's custody. Near the conclusion of the War of the Five Kings, Petyr Baelish was dispatched by the Lannisters to woo and wed Lady Lysa as a means to assuring the compliance of the Vale with the regime of King Joffrey and return it to the king's peace.
    
    Lysa ecstatically accepted his courtship and married him, but he murdered her shortly thereafter by defenestration (throwing her out the castle window), to keep her from revealing all his secrets to her niece Sansa.  However, before her death, Lysa divulged in a drunken hysterical episode that she had murdered Jon Arryn at Baelish's behest and instruction. After her murder, Baelish used the minstrel Marillion as a scapegoat.
    

Husband's Pictures

• Picture Notes
  • John Standing as JON ARRYN in HBO Game of Thrones

Husband's Pictures

• Picture Notes
  • Aidan Gillen as Petyr Baelish in HBO Game of Thrones