History Film / GreyGardens

* HollywoodPudgy: Big Edie needles her daughter for getting fat, a sentiment that Little Edie sadly agrees with. She weighs herself and is disappointed with a result of 145 -- a perfectly healthy weight for a woman of her height, but far from the physique she had as a dancer and model.

* HandyMan: "The Marble Faun", Jerry Torre, the teenaged handyman who is the only person who regulary visits the Beales. Little Edie thinks that Jerry wants sex with her and also is terrified at the prospect that he might move in and become a companion to Big Edie.[[note]]In reality, he had run from an abusive home and was just trying to hustle work. Jerry saw the Edies more as mother figures than anything else, which they in turn indulged to the extent they could.[[/note]] Torre, who was [[http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/03/06/060306ta_talk_green gay]], never did move into the house. He surfaced thirty-odd years later, working as a cab driver in New York City.

* LivingEmotionalCrutch: Mother and daughter are this for each other.

Big Edie died in 1977 at the age of 81, four years after the film was shot and the year after ''Grey Gardens'' was released in theatres. Little Edie sold the house in 1979 to ''Washington Post'' owner Ben Bradlee and his wife Sally Quinn, on the condition that it not be torn down. The house was extensively remodeled and still stands today. Little Edie lived in New York City, Florida, and elsewhere before her death in Florida in 2002 at the age of 84.

** SilverVixen: Little Edie despite her very rough living conditions still looked very good for someone nearly 60 years old at the time.

* CrazyCatLady: Could be TropeCodifier. A lot of the fictional cat ladies in various works have been inspired by the Beales. The scene where Big Edie matter-of-factly notes that one of the cats is urinating behind her portrait stands out.
** Taken UpToEleven in the scene where it is shown they aren't just crazy cat ladies but are crazy ''raccoon'' ladies as well, as they go up to the attic to feed the feral raccoons that live there.

* [[CoolOldLady Cool Old Ladies]]: Despite their disgusting living conditions, both women have a lot of interesting stories to tell about their high-society lives and are very engaging. The filmmakers took quite a shine to them as well.

* [[TheDutifulSon The Dutiful Daughter]]: Little Edie sees herself this way. She did not want to move into Grey Gardens and would rather have married an upper-class husband and lived her own life, but became a spinster because her mother has literally no one else.

* [[KindHeartedCatLover Kind Hearted Cat Lovers]]: Despite being barely able to care for themselves, the two dote on their many cats in their own way.

* [[ManChild Woman Child]]: Little Edie is childlike to the point of some people suspecting arrested development.

* BaldWomen: Little Edie, who always wears decorative scarves (sweaters or towels also do in a pinch) on her head. (She had the skin disease alopecia totalis, which makes literally all the hair on the body fall out.)

* HandyMan: "The Marble Faun", Jerry Torre, the teenaged handyman who is the only person who regulary visits the Beales. Little Edie thinks that Jerry wants sex with her and also is terrified at the prospect that he might move in and become a companion to Big Edie. Torre, who was [[http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/03/06/060306ta_talk_green gay]], never did move into the house. He surfaced thirty-odd years later, working as a cab driver in New York City.