Pete Campbell

Pete Campbell
Mad Men character
Vincent Kartheiser as Pete Campbell.
First appearance	"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" (1.01)
Last appearance	"Person to Person" (7.14)
Created by	Matthew Weiner
Portrayed by	Vincent Kartheiser
Information
Nickname(s)	"Pete"
Occupation	Account Executive, Partner: Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Former: Account Executive Co-Head of Accounts: Sterling Cooper
Family	Andrew Campbell (deceased father) Dorothy Dyckman-Campbell (deceased mother)
Spouse(s)	Trudy Campbell (wife)
Children	A son (with Peggy Olson) Tammy Campbell (with Trudy)
Romances	Peggy Olson (ex-lover) Beth Dawes (lover)

Peter Dyckman "Pete" Campbell (born February 28, 1934) is a fictional character on AMC's television series Mad Men. He is portrayed by Vincent Kartheiser.

Kartheiser has won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series twice along with the cast of Mad Men. He is the only actor out of the six main cast members of Mad Men to not receive a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

Pete Campbell was born to an upper-crust White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Manhattan family. His mother Dorothy "Dot" Campbell née Dyckman is descended from an old Dutch family that had arrived in New Amsterdam and at one point 'owned pretty much everything north of 125th street'. Pete has a strained relationship with his parents, who are emotionally distant and who disapprove of their son's decision to go into advertising. In Season Two, after his father dies in a plane crash over Jamaica Bay, Pete is unable to cry. Upon their father's death, Pete's older brother Bud examines their father's finances in relation to their inheritance from the family trust. Bud discovers that their father depleted the money put into the trust through years of a lavish lifestyle. When Bud tells Pete this news, they both seem unsurprised by their father's actions. Following this, Pete states that he in fact hated his father.

Later in Season Two, Pete reveals that he also hates his mother. Bud also resents his parents, but is treated and regarded by both parents as the favored son. Displaying a mutual resentment of their mother, Bud and Pete reminisce over Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope, loosely based on the story of Leopold and Loeb. When Pete's mother suggests that any possibility of Pete and his wife Trudy adopting a child would be unacceptable and lead to his being disinherited, Pete retaliates by telling her that their life savings have been squandered by his father. This originally was intended as a secret that Pete and Bud meant to keep from her. In Season six, when Pete's mother is forced to live with him in his apartment, he takes pleasure in exploiting her developing Alzheimer's disease to control her.