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Sarah Williams (played by Jennifer Connelly), is the main protagonist in Labyrinth.

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Role In The Film

At the start of Labyrinth, Sarah is seen acting out a scene from the play Labyrinth with only her dog Merlin with her as company. When the town clock strikes seven o' clock, Sarah remembers that she has to babysit her infant brother Toby and runs back home.

Upon returning home Sarah is told off by her step-mother Irene for being late, as she and Sarah's father Robert were due to go out for the evening. This provokes Sarah into a rage, and she storms upstairs into her room. Her parents ensure that Toby is safe in his cot, and leave while Sarah is still sulking in her room. Upon discovering that her toy bear Lancelot is missing from her collection of toys, Sarah storms into her parent's room where her brother is and finds the bear with him. Sarah flies into a rage and initially wishes that someone would take her away from "this awful place", lifting Toby out of his cot and telling him how much she resents him. She calms down, but as she leaves the room she says "I wish the Goblins would come and take you away. Right now." Sarah turns the light of her parent's bedroom off, but the next moment when she tries to turn the light on again the switch fails to work. Upon re-entering the room, Sarah finds that Toby has vanished.

After Toby's dissappearance a white barn owl flies into the room, and transforms into Jareth, The Goblin King. Jareth tells Sarah that he has taken the baby as she requested, and offers her a crystal that will reveal her dreams if she forgets about her brother. Sarah declines, and Jareth tells her that she has thirteen hours to rescue her brother from his labyrinth and that he will turn the baby into "one of us forever" if she fails to reach him in time.

Sarah sets off on her quest and quickly encounters Hoggle, a dwarf who works as a gardener in Jareth's labyrinth. When Sarah first meetings Hoggle, he is stunning faeries with a spray-gun. Sympathetic, Sarah lifts one of the faeries up in her hand to tend to it, only for it to bite her finger. After this, Sarah asks Hoggle to show her the entrance of Jareth's Labyrinth and is led to the front gates the open as she approaches. Hoggle leaves Sarah at this point, and Sarah is left to start her journey through the Labyrinth alone.

After running for a sustained period of time without making any progress, Sarah becomes frustrated and shrieks and hits the walls of the linear corridor she has been running through. She slumps down against one of the walls, and is addressed by a Worm who lives in a crack in the wall. The Worm tells Sarah that things in the Labyrinth are not what they seem, and suggests that she try walking through the wall adjacent to them as it contains an exit. Unable to see a way out, Sarah gingerly approaches the wall only to find it was an illusion and that it offers a way out of the endless corridor. Sarah finds herself in a new, disorientating area of the Labyrinth formed of oddly shaped walls and dead ends. Sarah tries to mark the route she is taking with lipstick, but eventually finds there are small creatures who are over-turning the stones she is marking, making her system useless. Sarah eventually encounters two guards assigned to two doors; one of the doors leads to the next area of the Labyrinth while the other leads to certain death. The guards challenge Sarah with a logic puzzle, which after some thought Sarah successfully solves. She takes the right door, but fails to look where she is going and falls down a tunnel lined with hundreds of animated, scaled hands that catch her mid-fall. The hands ask Sarah if she wants to go up or down, and Sarah chooses down and finds herself trapped in an Oubliette, a dark pit from which there is no escape.





An imaginative 15-year-old with a love of fantasy and fairy tales. Although she briefly wishes for Toby to be taken away, she feels immediately guilty and asks for his return. She is dedicated to her quest for that return, very attached to her friends, and courageous when another is threatened. She resists Jareth's affections in order to fulfill her quest. She is more intelligent than she actually thinks, this is shown when she is in the Labyrinth and realising that all is not what it seems there and she needs to think things through properly. Sarah herself appears as a figurine in her own room, represented in inanimate form by the music box of a girl standing in a crystal gazebo, wearing the dress from the ballroom sequence, which can be seen on the right-hand side of her desk along with the figure of Jareth; also, there is a poster of an M.C. Escher staircase on her wall, representing the staircase in the Labyrinth. Other foreshadowed characters visible in Sarah's room are a stuffed Ludo doll, a Firey doll, a Sir Didymus doll, a Hoggle bookend, and a poster reminiscent of the cleaners.

Personality

Appearance

Appearances In Other Media

Return to Labyrinth

In the manga sequel to the film, Sarah is a supporting character, living a subdued life as a teacher and sharing a close relationship with her half-brother, Toby. A stylized, younger version of Sarah appears frequently in flashbacks and in scenes of Jareth's imagination. Mizumi briefly takes this form while mocking Jareth about his apparent loss of power. Volume II closes with Sarah opening her door to find that Jareth has come to see her. Volume III shows that Sarah does not remember Jareth, who lures in her into some kind of trap at the end of the volume.

Marvel Comic Book Adaptation

Sarah is generally portrayed in the same way as the film in this adaptation, however there are some small but note-worthy diffirences in her charecterization.

Labyrinth: The Storybook

The Novelization

Behind The Scenes

Photo Gallery

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