A Soviet-trained assassin, handed over as a child and rebuilt into a weapon, who defects and spends the rest of her life trying to be worth more than what she was made for.
Natasha Romanoff was born in the Soviet Union in 1984 and given, as a child, to a programme that trained girls as spies under the cover of a ballet academy and sterilised them when they graduated. She was raised inside a false family with two handlers playing her parents and another girl playing her sister, until the mission in Ohio ended in 1995 and the arrangement was dissolved.
She defects, and every version of her afterwards is a performance of somebody who has decided what to be. That is the trick of the character. She arrives in the films as a fake assistant, then a fake ally, then a colleague, then the person holding the team together, and the honest moments are so rationed that each one lands.
She has no powers, no armour and no serum. What she has is a very specific professional competence and a ledger she describes as being written in red, which is why the story keeps handing her the jobs that require somebody to decide what a life is worth.
Show detailsThe family that was an assignment
The parents were Alexei Shostakov and Melina Vostokoff. The younger sister was Yelena Belova. None of it was real, and all of it lasted long enough to be the only childhood any of them had. When Shostakov finished the job he had been sent to Ohio to do in 1995, the four of them ran to Cuba, and General Dreykov put both girls into the Red Room.
Black Widow is built on the fact that a false family behaves exactly like a real one from the inside. It is the most uncomfortable idea in the character, and it is why her solo film has more to say about her than the eight films that came before it.
Major spoiler
She dies on Vormir. The Red Skull, who guards the Soul Stone, tells them a life has to be given for it, and she and Barton each try to be the one who goes over the edge. She wins the fight, and she falls. Banner admits later that he tried to use the Stones to bring her back and could not.