Delia Deetz was the wife of Charles Deetz and stepmother of Lydia Deetz. She is a minor character in Beetlejuice.
Biography[]
Sometime after his first marriage ended in divorce, Charles married Delia, a struggling artist specializing in gothic style. While she and Charles would have a ambiguous marriage, she did not get along with her stepdaughter Lydia.
Charles secretly purchases the Maitland residence as an escape from life in New York, forcing the family to move from New Yor to Connecticut. Delia immediately hates the house and makes it a goal to remodel it to her taste, much to the horror of the Maitlands who are haunting the house. In a span of 3 months, she transforms the house into one of goth style and full of her artwork.
The Maitlands try to scare the family out but Delia and Charles can not see them, though Lydia quickly finds out about them and agrees to help. Delia dismisses Lydia’s photos of the ghosts as fake and is more focused on impressing her dinner guests. During the dinner, she gets annoyed when Lydia brings up the ghosts again until the Maitlands possesses the adults into singing and dancing to Day-O. This excites Delia and Charles who sees this as a way to gain fame and wealth via using the house as a haunted amusement park. However the Maitlands refuse to show themselves from the attic where they’ve been hiding. Beetlejuice then manifests into a snake to terrorize the family before being summoned away by the Maitlands.
Otho convinces Charles and Delia to gather their guests once more for a séance to force the ghosts to appear. The Maitlands do appear but Otho has unintentionally performed an exorcism, causing them to decay and ‘die’, much to Delia’s horror. Lydia summons Beetlejuice to save the Maitlands and, after doing to, greets Charles and Delia as Lydia had agreed to marry him in exchange for his help. With them as witnesses to the ceremony, he traps them with Delia’s artwork. However they are freed when the Maitlands interfere and send him back to the afterlife. Delia and Charles then finally meet the Maitlands. Some months pass, during which the adults co exist in the house.