Winifred Burkle

Winifred "Fred" Burkle
Angel character
Amy Acker as Winifred Burkle
First appearance	"Belonging" (2001)
Portrayed by	Amy Acker
Information
Affiliation	Angel Investigations Wolfram & Hart

Winifred "Fred" Burkle is a fictional character created by Joss Whedon and introduced by Shawn Ryan and Mere Smith on the television series Angel. The character is portrayed by Amy Acker.

Fred was born in San Antonio, Texas to Roger and Patricia "Trish" Burkle. When she finished college, she moved to Los Angeles for graduate school at UCLA. Originally majoring in history, Fred took a physics class with Professor Seidel, which inspired her to take another path. Around this time, she began working at Stewart Brunell Public Library. In 1996, while shelving a demon language book, a curious Fred recited the text out loud and was accidentally sucked into a dimensional portal to Pylea (her future friend Lorne was sucked into the same portal on his side and ended up in Los Angeles). It was later discovered that the portal was actually opened by Fred's jealous college professor, Professor Seidel, who had sent every promising student to it, essentially sending them to their death. Fred was the only one of at least six to return (cf. "Supersymmetry"). In high school or college, Fred was a marijuana user as shown in the episode "Spin the Bottle". In that episode, she asks Wesley and "Liam" for weed and was also revealed to have had to take a personality disorder test and to be something of a conspiracy theorist.

For five years, Fred spent an arduous life as a "cow", the Pylean word for humans who are kept as slaves, and then as a fugitive. The harsh life of solitude and serfdom took a serious toll on her social skills, as well as her mental health; when Angel meets Fred, she is curled up in a cave, scribbling on the already-covered walls, having seemingly convinced herself that her previous life in L.A. had not been real.

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