Impoverished Patrician / Live-Action Films

• In Le Capitaine Fracasse, Philippe de Sigognac is a baron, but he's penniless. He dresses modestly, his castle is falling in ruins and his servant has to poach rabbits so they can eat meat. That doesn't prevent him from giving hospitality to a Commedia dell'Arte troupe the cart of which is stuck on a nearby road.
• The same for Captain Fracassa's Journey. An ancestor of Sigognac (probably his grandfather) spent all the family's wealth in wars and "vices". Consequently, Henri (he is named Henri in this version) and his only servant are poorly dressed, they don't have much to eat and the castle is falling in ruins.
• Rose DeWitt Bukater (and her mother Ruth) in Titanic. In fact, the entire reason Rose was on the Titanic was to travel to Philadelphia to marry Caledon Hockley at the behest of her mother so she could return to her lavish lifestyle.
• Victor Fargas, the Portuguese nobleman in The Ninth Gate. His family mansion is run-down and devoid of furniture, and he apparently makes ends meet by selling off his book collection piece by piece.
• Lord Wessex in Shakespeare in Love. He wanted to marry Viola de Lesseps because her family's merchant wealth would provide him with enough money to operate his tobacco plantations in America. Viola's family, meanwhile, would gain the social advantage of marriage to nobility. Although it is implied that he is more representative of the "new men" who rose to the top of English society, displacing the old nobility, under the Tudors. The title of his family, quite possibly awarded for military service, may go back no further than to the reign of Henry VII or VIII. Worth noting that the colonies of this era all failed and wouldn't succeed until 20+ years later.
• Count Arisztid in Three Smart Girls is a Hungarian noble who is flat broke, as well as being a dissolute alcoholic, and thus cheerfully accepts a mission to seduce a Gold Digger fiancee away from the father of the titular three girls.
• In Penelope (2006), the titular character's parents are seeking this type, as they need to marry her off to a blue-blood to break her curse of pig-nosedness, but need one poor enough that a sizable dowry is incentive enough to marry a girl with a pig nose.
• Leopold from Kate & Leopold has no money, which is why his uncle pressures him to marry a rich American. He complains about it in the beginning but in the end, he understands that there are some things that a person just needs to do.
• The Ninth Gate: Victor Fargas is a proud and elegant man whose possessions are all expensive and fancy. However, as he freely admits, he doesn't have many of those possessions left (e.g. owning only a single set of wine glasses). His house also lacks any servants, and he's sold over a fifth of his proud library of rare books (which he calls his only reason for living) to pay the taxes on the mansion that he's too proud and sentimental to sell.
  Fargas: Old families are like ancient civilizations: they wither and die.
• Graf von Droste-Schattenburg in One, Two, Three. Played for Laughs — he works as a bathroom attendant and is paid to adopt the Communist Otto, who married (and impregnated) the daughter of the Coca-Cola boss.
• Bard from The Hobbit is descended from the last King of Dale, ruler of one of the richest kingdoms in Middle Earth. Bard meanwhile makes much of his living on smuggling.
• Dark Shadows: The Collins family fell on hard times and couldn't even afford to keep the whole manor warm until Barnabas Collins showed them the secret compartment where his parents hid their valuables. It's unclear what became of them after the climax. Though the treasure room was below ground and seemed framed by stone, so it had a more than decent chance of surviving. Certainly enough to work with if they ever decided to capitalize on the Sequel Hook at the end.
• Ever After: Baroness Rhodmila of Ghent externally acts like she has money to burn when in actuality she secretly sells possessions and even a servant to pay off her debts.
• Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane is described as coming from an old, rich family where one day the old man shoots himself and they discover they have nothing.
• In The Magnificent Ambersons, Major Amberson dies, leaving behind a worthless estate and numerous debts, with George's Aunt Fanny losing everything due to bad investments, resulting in the Ambersons' home and belongings being sold off.
• Mr. Maranov in The Whales of August is a Russian nobleman who had to flee after Red October. He has survived ever since on his mother's jewels and the kindness of strangers.
• Jupiter Ascending:
  • "Impoverished" is a relative term here, but all three heirs stood to lose a portion of their inheritance once Jupiter ascended. A few lines also make it clear they're no longer even in the line of inheritance if she dies, her Earth family would Ascend. Given that Kalique's scheme hinged on this, it can be presumed that the lion's share of Jupiter's inheritance would come out of Balem's holdings. Titus in particular is this: while he maintains an expensive lifestyle, he's running out of money and failed a recent financial enterprise, which is why he competes with his siblings for control of Earth.
  • While at the house of a wealthy client, a young woman is dithering over the prospect of receiving a marriage proposal from one of America's richest bachelors. She compares herself to Cinderella. The irony is lost on her, though clearly not on Jupiter.
• In Back to the Future, if we take his remark about "it taking his entire family fortune" to build his time machine at face value, then Doc Brown's family was quite well off when he was younger. In fact, the 1955 version of Doc lives in a fairly large house with a fair bit of land under it. By 1985, the only structure of the old property remaining is the garage, which is next door to a McDonald's. The Tell Tale Games series shows Doc's father was a judge and expected his son to be the same.
• The two little girls from the flashbacks in Sleepy Hollow (1999) were members of a local rich family, but their lands were rented, and confiscated after their family was evicted and their mother was executed as a witch, forcing them to live in the woods. One girl grew up into Katrina's Wicked Stepmother, Mary van Tassel, and the other into the Witch of the Western Woods.
• The O’Hara cousins, in the middle section of Gone with the Wind following the invasion by the Union Army.
• In A Knight's Tale, after William is exposed as a Fake Aristocrat, Edward the Black Prince steps forward and declares that his personal scholars have discovered that William comes from a now-impoverished line of nobles. He thus pronounces that William is indeed allowed to participate in the tournament. He also preempts any attempt to question the "discovery" by stating that, as a prince, his own word is beyond question.
• The Penguin: According to the portrait of the Penguin presented in both Batman: The Animated Series and Tim Burton's Batman Returns, Oswald Cobblepot is impoverished because he was ostracized by his own social class (and by the human race in general) for looking like a penguin. In Batman Returns, the Penguin is perfectly aware of his degradation and is determined to get revenge on society, while in the animated series he is simply in denial about how the world views him.
• In The Ghost Goes Gear, Algernon's family manor has fallen into disrepair, and his parents are so broke that they've resorted to mooching off the maid.
• This is a major plot point in Crimson Peak. Sir Thomas Sharpe, Baronet of Cumberland, has the fancy titles and storied lineage, but decades of horrible financial waste and mismanagement from previous generations of his family, especially his father, mean that his family is a financial wreck and the ancestral mansion is so broken down that it's barely inhabitable, especially during the winter. Said mansion is actually sinking into the ground around it, due to the land being both soft and unstable, making it practically certain that attempting to salvage it is a doomed effort, but Thomas and his sister have basically nothing except the land they inherited and have to try to make something out of it.
• In Les Visiteurs, the Montmirails have become this in The '90s: they have sold their family castle a few years back, and Béatrice, their last descendant, lives in a cozy bourgeois house with her dentist husband.
• When the Last Sword Is Drawn: As a samurai, Yoshimura is the Japanese equivalent of a knight, a retainer of the lord of Nambu, but he barely earns enough teaching at his lord's sword dojo to keep his family fed and housed. He initially asks his lord for permission to leave the clan to join the Shinsengumi for higher wages, then runs away in the night anyway when denied permission, which leads to his son being bullied by other students.
• In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the King of Swamp Castle presumably once had great wealth to be able to build four castles in succession, but as he notes when pressuring his son to marry a wealthy heiress, when you build a castle on swampland just to show up all the other kings, you need all the land you can get.

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