Sunny von Bülowm. 1966–1987

Deceased (1926–2019)

92 years (1926–2019)

Mysterious Death The prosecution asserted that von Bulow had injected his wife with insulin to cause her death and claim a $14 million inheritance from her will. Her net worth at the time was about $75 million.

Jeremy Irons

When socialite Sunny von Bülow (Glenn Close) inexplicably slips into an irreversible coma, police suspect foul play — and the obvious suspect is her urbane husband, Claus (Jeremy Irons). After being found guilty of murder, Claus is granted a retrial and hires showboat Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver) to represent him. Though unconvinced of Claus’s innocence, Dershowitz enjoys a challenge and — along with a group of his students — fights to have the verdict overturned.

Reversal of Fortune

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Aristotle introduces the concepts of peripeteia (reversal of fortune) and anagnorisis (discovery or recognition) in his discussion of simple and complex plots. Peripeteia is the reversal from one state of affairs to its opposite.

Oedipus’s reversal of fortune occurs when he realizes that he is the son of Laius and Jocasta. The messenger comes to Oedipus to relieve the King of the fear that he will kill his own father as predicted by the Oracle.

Peripeteia, (Greek: “reversal”) the turning point in a drama after which the plot moves steadily to its denouement. It is discussed by Aristotle in the Poetics as the shift of the tragic protagonist’s fortune from good to bad, which is essential to the plot of a tragedy.

“Tragedy,” says Aristotle, “is an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” Ambiguous means may be employed, Aristotle maintains in contrast to Plato, to a virtuous and purifying end.