Snow Nolan (née White) is a main character on ABC's Once Upon a Time. She is portrayed by Ginnifer Goodwin, with her younger self portrayed by Bailee Madison. Snow was once a young and naive princess who could want for nothing, until both her parents mysteriously died and her stepmother Regina took control of the kingdom. Snow ran away and became a fugitive under the Queen's wrath. When Regina cast the first Dark Curse, it consumed Snow along with everyone else to Storybrooke, where she became a timid school teacher, Mary Margaret Blanchard, until her daughter Emma broke the Curse. Her gallery is here.
Biography
Background
Born in a royal family to King Leopold and Queen Eva, Snow White was used to being a princess and having everyone obey her every whim, ordering around maids like Johanna until Snow's mother taught her to be a fair and respectful for when she eventually becomes queen herself. Snow learns from her mother how to be kind, and when Eva falls ill, Snow desperately seeks out the Blue Fairy for a cure. The Blue Fairy appears and gives Snow a cursed candle, in which one must die for the other person to heal. However, Snow cannot bring herself to do it, and so Eva dies soon after. Eventually, her father the King, seeks a new wife and when Snow is saved on horseback by a woman named Regina, he proposes to her. Although Regina accepts, Snow eventually realizes that Regina does not truly love the King and secretly loves the stable boy, Daniel. Snow promises to keep this a secret, but eventually confesses this to Regina's mother, Cora. Cora, who arranged the marriage between her daughter and King Leopold in the first place, sees Daniel as a threat and so murders him.
Regina marries King Leopold and becomes Snow's stepmother. However, Regina discovers that Daniel's death was indirectly caused by Snow, and so she plots revenge against her. Regina organizes the death of Snow's father, before hiring the Huntsman to kill Snow White. However, the Huntsman takes pity on Snow and lets her go, where she is on the run from Regina, who charges Snow as a criminal wanted for murder, treason and treachery. Snow becomes allies with seven dwarves, along with Red Riding Hood and eventually falls in love with David. Their love for each other results in an uneasy relationship as both of them are on the run from their step-parents. Regina then meets with Snow and blackmails her into eating a poisoned apple, in exchange for not killing David. Snow takes a bite from the apple and falls into a death-like sleep. The dwarves place her in a glass coffin, where she is believed to be dead until David arrives and gives her one final kiss, which ends up waking Snow up. They get married and Snow becomes pregnant with their first child, a girl who they call Emma. However, Regina unleashes the first Dark Curse which consumes the Enchanted Forest. Snow and David manage to place baby Emma in a magic wardrobe which transports her to another realm before the curse hits.
Season 1
In Storybrooke, Snow White becomes Mary Margaret Blanchard, a timid and modest person who longs for true love and is additionally the schoolteacher of Regina's adoptive son, Henry. Henry's biological mother arrives in town due to Henry contacting her, Emma Swan. Unknown to Snow, who is cursed, Emma is her daughter and Henry is her grandson. When David wakes up from his coma, despite the curse giving him a wife named Kathryn, he and Snow fall in love all over again. Regina tries to break them up by framing Snow for the supposed death of Kathryn, and David begins to believe that she is behind the murder. However, Emma manages to break the first Dark Curse and both Snow and David regain their memories, and reunite.
Season 2
After Rumplestiltskin unleashes a wraith, Emma, Snow and David try and find a way to defeat it, and so they use the Mad Hatter's hat to open a portal. However, the wraith drags Emma in with it, and Snow goes in after her. Snow and Emma arrive in the Enchanted Forest, where they become allies with Mulan and Aurora. Eventually using the magical Lake Nostos to make a portal back to Storybrooke, they are followed by Cora and the handsome yet murderous Captain Hook. Snow finds out that Cora had actually disguised herself as the Blue Fairy and had given Snow the candle herself, also revealing that she poisoned Snow's mother as well. After Cora slaughters Snow's former maid Johanna, Snow seeks revenge and eventually uses the candle on Cora's disembodied heart, before manipulating Regina into putting the heart back inside Cora. Regina does this, not knowing the heart is poisoned, and Cora dies in her arms. Another feud erupts between Snow and Regina, but it ends when Snow helps save Regina from Tamara and Greg, who then kidnaps Henry and takes him through a portal. Snow, Emma, David, Rumplestiltskin, Regina and Hook follow them through a portal on Hook's ship.
Season 3
They all arrive in Neverland, where it is revealed that Greg and Tamara were following orders from the island's ruler, Peter Pan. After heart-wrenching situations and facing various perils whether it is Lost Boys or their own person problems being magnified within the density of the situation, they all manage to rescue Henry. Snow joins everyone else, including the Lost Boys, back to The Jolly Roger where they use Peter Pan's shadow to make the ship fly back to Storybrooke. However, Peter Pan goes with him, inside Henry's body. Pan is let loose upon Storybrooke, and he plans on enacting another Dark Curse which will reform Storybrooke in his image, making it "the new Neverland". Pan fails when Rumplestiltskin, who is revealed to be Pan's son, kills them both with the Dark One's dagger. Regina interferes with Pan's curse, so that everyone in Storybrooke returns to the Enchanted Forest. After being transported to their homeworld, Snow and the others go to Regina's castle to find that it has been occupied by an unwanted visitor, the Wicked Witch of the West. However, Regina manages to infiltrate the castle and lowers the protection spell, prompting the Wicked Witch to leave. Despite this, Aurora and Phillip eventually reveal that the Wicked Witch wants Snow and David's second child, as Snow is now pregnant. Learning from Glinda the Good Witch of the South that only one that wields powerful enough light magic can defeat the Wicked Witch, Snow realizes that they need to unleash another curse to find Emma.
Reluctantly, Snow uses David's heart to enact the curse, killing him, but the Wicked Witch tampers with the curse so that everyone who hasn't consumed a memory potion will forget the past year in the Enchanted Forest. Snow begs Regina to split Snow's heart in two, and Regina reluctantly does so and puts the two halves into Snow and David's bodies, resurrecting David. However, the curse then consumes them and they return to Storybrooke, but with their memories of the past year in the Enchanted Forest wiped, they are unable to remember anything about the Wicked Witch, or who cast the curse and why. Now heavily pregnant, Snow and the others reunite with Emma, who was brought to Storybrooke by Hook. Snow meets Zelena, who claims to be a midwife. Zelena offers to help Snow with her baby, and Snow accepts her help. However, it is eventually revealed by Rumplestiltskin - who was resurrected by Baelfire and Belle, who used the Vault of the Dark One - that Zelena and the Wicked Witch are the same person, to which it is also revealed that Zelena wants Snow's baby because it is one of the ingredients needed for a time-travel spell. However, despite Emma being the apparent needed hero, Regina (who is revealed to be Zelena's half-sister) breaks the third Dark Curse and manages to use enough light magic to defeat Zelena just after Zelena kidnaps Snow's newborn baby. After Zelena's apparent suicide, Snow and David celebrate the birth of their son, Neal, at Granny's Diner.
Season 4
When a wall of ice surrounds Storybrooke, along with an attack from a snow monster and a mass power outage in Storybrooke due to Elsa's ice magic, Granny and two dwarves, Leroy and Happy, turn to Snow and claim that she is the new town leader as she cast the last curse. Pressured into finding a way to restore power to the town, Snow eventually snaps and yells at them, and they go away. However, she does manage to return power to Storybrooke with a back-up fuel supply line. As the new acting mayor of Storybrooke, Snow decides to make the mayoral office a place that should no longer be feared by the community. When Marian falls victim to an ice-based freezing curse, the townsfolk start to blame Elsa, who is unable to lower the ice wall due to it being sustained by some other magic. However, the spell on Marian and the ice wall still surrounding the town turns out to be the actions of Ingrid, also known as the Snow Queen, Emma's former foster mother. Ingrid casts the Spell of Shattered Sight upon Storybrooke and while under the Spell, Snow engages in a fight with Regina. The Spell of Shattered Sight is eventually broken when Ingrid realizes her actions and sacrifices herself to end the Spell. After the Spell is broken, Snow resigns her brief position as mayor and resumes her job as a school teacher, but becomes paranoid when Cruella De Vil and Ursula arrive in Storybrooke and resurrect Maleficent, who resents Snow and David for taking away Maleficent's baby. They eventually tell Emma that they transferred her darkness into Maleficent's baby. Emma stays mad at her parents for a while, but eventually forgives them and apologizes for how she wrongly treated them, especially to her mother who almost got killed because of Lily and by her spiting. However, Emma forgave and went mad at them for nothing because it was revealed that the Author, Isaac Heller, wrote and made her and her prince do this against their will under his writing, and Snow and Charming got him to fess up and why he did it when they arrested him and after Henry replaced him as the new author.
Season 5
Snow goes with her family and friends to the Enchanted Forest via cyclone, after Emma absorbs the Darkness from Rumplestiltskin and becomes the new Dark One. They are greeted by King Arthur and his knights, and are invited to Camelot as guests. Six weeks later, Snow and the others return to Storybrooke with no memories of their time in Camelot. When it turns out Hook is a Dark One too, the process to remove it from him and Emma causes Hook's death. Snow goes along with Emma and the others to the Underworld to retrieve Hook. However, when Ruby arrives in the Underworld via slippers, they all decide that Snow must return to Storybrooke to look after Neal. Snow is present in Oz when Ruby awakens Dorothy from a sleeping curse with true love's kiss, before returning to Storybrooke and reuniting with Neal. Shortly after, the others return from the Underworld. Snow, David, Hook and Zelena briefly find themselves in the Land of Untold Stories, where they encounter Hyde.
Season 6
Snow and David welcome the Land of Untold Stories inhabitants to Storybrooke, offering them all dinner at Granny's. Snow later returns to her job as a teacher, and begins teaching classes again, with the help of the teacher's aide, Shirin. However, they discover that Shirin is actually Princess Jasmine of Agrabah. After Regina separates herself from the Evil Queen - her darker side - the Evil Queen sets her sights on her previous goal to destroy Snow White. Snow and David's shared heart is cursed by the Evil Queen, which results in them having to take turns enduring a Sleeping Curse, until the people of Storybrooke unite and each inflict themselves with the same curse, diluting it to the point where nobody is affected by it. Snow attends Emma and Killian's wedding, only for them all to be consumed by the Black Fairy's curse, which sends Snow, David, Regina and Hook back to the Enchanted Forest. When the curse is broken and the Black Fairy is defeated, Snow starts teaching again.
Alternate Universe
Snow White is a tyrannical ruler, who wants revenge on Regina for accidentally causing the death of James, who Snow loved. Snow sought a relationship with David, and ripped out his heart to make him one of her henchmen. Snow almost kills Regina on one occasion, before Regina is saved by Robin Hood.
Family/Relationships
Alive:
- David Nolan (husband)
- Emma Swan-Jones (daughter)
- Killian Jones (son-in-law)
- Hope Jones (Granddaughter)
- Neal Nolan (son)
- Henry Mills (Grandson)
- Henry (Wish Relam) (Second Grandson)
- Lucy Mills (great-grandaughter)
- Ella Mills (grandaughter-in-law)
- Regina Mills (stepmother)
- Zelena Mills (maternal step-aunt)
- Robin Hood (maternal step-cousin)
- Wilby (family dog)
Deceased:
- Eva White (mother)
- Leopold White (father)
- Ruth Nolan (mother-in-law)
- Robert Nolan (father-in-law)
- Baelfire (would've been son-in-law)
- James (brother-in-law)
- Cora Mills (maternal step-grandmother)
- Prince Henry (maternal step-grandfather)
- The Miller (maternal step-grandfather)
- King Xavier (maternal step-grandfather)
Status: Alive
Trivia
- She is based on Snow White from the fairytale of the same name, Snow White.
- She also loosely alludes to Perseus from Greek Mythology.
- Her parents named her Snow because she was born during the harshest of winters.
- Like her daughter and grandson, Snow enjoys cinnamon on her hot chocolate.
- In Hyperion Heights, a girl dressed as Snow White for Halloween.
- The fan-dubbed ship name for Snow and David is "Snowing".
Appearances
- S1, E01: "Pilot"
- S1, E02: "The Thing You Love Most"
- S1, E03: "Snow Falls"
- S1, E04: "The Price of
- S1, E05: "That Still Small Voice"
- S1, E06: "The Shepherd"
- S1, E07: "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"
- S1, E08: "Desperate Souls"
- S1, E09: "True North"
- S1, E10: "7:15 A.M."
- S1, E11: "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree"
- S1, E12: "Skin Deep"
- S1, E13: "What Happened to Frederick"
- S1, E14: "Dreamy"
- S1, E15: "Red-Handed"
- S1, E16: "Heart of Darkness"
- S1, E17: "Hat Trick"
- S1, E18: "The Stable Boy"
- S1, E19: "The Return"
- S1, E20: "The Stranger"
- S1, E21: "An Apple Red as Blood"
- S1, E22: "A Land Without Magic"