The assistant who was already running the company before anyone gave her the title, and who spends a decade being the only person Tony Stark cannot argue with.
Pepper Potts starts as an administrative assistant and ends as the chief executive of the company, and the films are unusually clear that the promotion was overdue rather than generous. She came up through accounting, she caught a discrepancy nobody else had, and she was handling Stark Industries long before the job title changed.
Her position in the story is structural. Everyone else who challenges Tony Stark is either a colleague, a rival or an enemy, and can be argued with on those terms. She has neither armour nor a mandate, and she is the only person whose disapproval he cannot route around.
The films also quietly give her the ending nobody else in this material gets. She stops. There is a house, a lake, a child, and five years of not being an Avenger, and when she does put on a suit it is once, for one day, because someone has to.
Show detailsWhat the sources actually count
The article says she has appeared in seven films, and this catalogue lists seven. Getting there requires a decision: two of the films its own section headings point at, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, describe only things she did off screen, and a third, Spider-Man: Far From Home, mentions her without showing her.
Those three are not counted here. It is the reading that makes the article’s own total come out right, and it is the reading that matches what is on screen.