Stanley lives in the working-class Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans with his wife, Stella (née DuBois), and is employed as a factory parts salesman.

He is a controlling, hard-edged man, with no discernible capacity for empathy, forgiveness, or patience, and no apparent family ties of his own, although he once mentions a cousin.

He also has a vicious temper and fights with his wife, sometimes leading to instances of domestic violence, which mirror those of the older married couple who live upstairs, the Hubbells.

He learns from Shaw that she was paid to leave Mississippi to quell gossip about her many affairs, which she began after her husband, a closeted homosexual, committed suicide.

He finds a similarly drunk Blanche, lost in fantasies of soon-to-be happy times, benefit of Shep Huntleigh.

In the original play, Stella refuses to allow herself to believe Blanche (with the support of Eunice Hubbell) and stays with Stanley, although she seems to need to convince herself.

[4] In 1976 Rip Torn played Stanley opposite his wife Geraldine Page as Blanche in a Chicago production that was described as raw, dangerous and threateningly realistic, pushing the Streetcar script to the farthest reaches of urban violence and unabated naturalism.

[5] Aidan Quinn and Christopher Walken both played the role opposite Blythe Danner's Blanche in two different stage productions.