Clara Clayton-Brown

Clara Clayton-Brown
Biographical information
Date of birth	October 25, 1855
Age (1885)	30 (deceased in original timeline)
Physical description
Gender	Female
Eye color	Brown
Behind-the-scenes information
Played by	Mary Steenburgen
Voiced by	Mary Steenburgen; Back to the Future: The Animated Series; Karen Strassman; LEGO Dimensions
	[Source]

" He [Doc] took his first real look at the woman he had saved. / "Thank you, sir," she began, as she turned her face to look up at him. / And what a face. Doc stopped breathing all over again. Her face had been hidden in shadow before, framed by that attractive bonnet. But then she smiled. / And what a smile. Doc thought it was like looking at the sun for the first time. / "—you saved my—" She paused as she, too, really looked at Doc. / She sighed the sweetest sigh Doc had ever heard. "—life," she concluded. / And what wonderful features surrounded that smile! That pert nose, that strong chin, those deep, large brown eyes that a man could get lost in — Doc sighed, then realized that, perhaps, he should say something in return. "

—From Back to the Future Part III by Craig Shaw Gardner (quote, pages 98 and 99)

"Clara was one in a million... One in a billion... One in a googolplex... The woman of my dreams, and I've lost her for all time."

—Doc Brown

Clara Clayton-Brown is the tritagonist of the Back to the Future franchise, serving as the deuteragonist of Back to the Future Part III and the tritagonist of Back to the Future: The Animated Series. She was a schoolteacher, living and working in the schoolhouse outside Hill Valley in 1885. She met Dr. Emmett Brown and Marty McFly by chance when she was about to fall over Shonash Ravine.

Clara was a very independent woman and did not take much fuss from anyone, especially Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen. Clara did not like being lied to and believed that people should tell the truth. She often saved the day after coming up with ideas, she did however try and take actions that helped her or other people avoid dangerous situations in the first place.

Clara was a very intelligent woman. Like Doc, her favorite author was Jules Verne, and she was very interested in astronomy and science. One of her favorite possessions was her telescope, which she often used to look at the Moon and the stars; she also appeared to know where a lot of the constellations were. Clara was a thinker and most of the time thought things through. If she believed something to be too "wacky" or too fantastic to be believed, she would not believe it (such as when Doc tried telling her about the time machine); this, after her marriage to Doc, changed.

Biography

Original History

Clara Clayton was born on October 25, 1855, in New Jersey,^[1] the daughter of Daniel and Martha Clayton. Her uncle, Ulysses S. Clayton, was a general in the American Civil War.

When Clara was 11, she caught diphtheria and was quarantined for three months, so her father bought her a telescope and put it next to her bed so she could see everything outside the window. This ignited a love of science and astronomy that would stay with her for the rest of her life.

Little is known about her life between 1873 and 1885, except she became a schoolteacher and had been doing the job for some years before 1885. When she heard that the position of the new schoolteacher in Hill Valley was available, she decided to leave New Jersey behind and head out West to start a new life in California.^[2]

On September 4, 1885, Clara moved out to Hill Valley, California, taking up a job as a schoolteacher. But as no one had come to pick her up, she rented two horses and a wagon buckboard from Joe Statler. However the horses were spooked by a snake and she died falling into Shonash Ravine, which was renamed Clayton Ravine in her memory. The story of her death became a legend among Hill Valley school children who had teachers they wished would also fall into the ravine.

First altered timeline

Doc volunteered to pick up Clara from the train station, in September 4, 1885. where they met and fell in love at first sight and she invited him to attend the Hill Valley Festival, Sadly, Doc was shot in the back by Buford Tannen in the festival the next day, and died on September 7, 1885. Clara helped pay for Doc's tombstone, engraving it with "Beloved Clara".

Clara's fate after Doc died from Buford's wounds is left ambiguous, both in the film and in extra-textual statements by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis: in their official summary of this timeline, her ultimate death was unconnected to the ravine, suggesting that if Marty had visited the ravine on his second trip to 1955 he would have noticed it was still called "Shonash Ravine." In this scenario, she either stayed in Hill Valley as a schoolteacher or moved elsewhere to start her own life without Doc. Another scenario they proposed, inspired by a popular fan theory, is that she took her own life on September 15, 1885 due to her distress over Doc's death by throwing herself into the ravine, and it was thus renamed "Clayton Ravine" in her honor. Gale and Zemeckis have avoided canonizing either possibility to allow viewers to decide for themselves.^[3]