Ambrose Monk
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| Ambrose Monk | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | Mr. Monk and the Three Pies |
| Portrayed by | John Turturro |
| Information | |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | writer of owner's manuals |
| Family | Adrian Monk (brother) Jack Monk Jr. (half-brother) Jack Monk (father) Trudy Monk (sister-in-law) |
Ambrose Monk is a fictional character on the USA Network television series Monk. He is played by John Turturro.
Ambrose is the brother of Adrian Monk, the main character. He suffers from agoraphobia. He can be seen in person in two episodes, "Mr. Monk and the Three Pies", and "Mr. Monk Goes Home Again", as well as in home movies as shown in Mr. Monk is On the Air. He has a romantic interest in Natalie Teeger, Adrian's assistant.
Ambrose writes owner's manuals for many different consumer products in multiple languages which he taught himself. The house he lives in is cluttered with his work, piles of newspapers, and filing cabinets which are stuffed with his father's mail spanning the entirety of his father's absence.
[edit] Biography
He blames himself for the death of Adrian's wife, Trudy. At Ambrose's request, Trudy was out buying him cough medicine when she was murdered by a bomb planted under the front seat of her car. Guilt-ridden, Ambrose avoided all contact with Adrian for seven years after the incident.
When Adrian and Ambrose were children, they shared a strong bond with their father. This may have been due to his strict rules, such as not ever entering his office, and the boys' social seclusion, causing a sort of dependency. In the episode 'Mr. Monk meets his Dad', Jack Monk explains to Adrian in his truck that he opened up a fortune cookie which said 'Stand by your man', so he followed his own path and left. Ever since, Ambrose has been obsessed with the idea of his return, even to the point of preparing a dinner plate for him every night, just in case. Adrian feels differently, believing his father will never return. However, their father showed up at Ambrose's doorstep to leave a note. Adrian and Ambrose, who were in an ambulance at the time, missed their father's appearance but the note congratulated Ambrose on finally leaving the house. Ambrose has left the house only one other time, when it was on fire.
The relationship between Ambrose and Adrian parallels that of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes. While Ambrose has a great admiration for Adrian's success in criminology and for the level of normality of Adrian's life (i.e., going out into the world and marrying), he believes that detective work is less cognitively taxing than his own profession of writing multi-lingual instructional manuals. Ambrose himself has been shown to possess deductive skills that surpass Adrian's, such as knowing that flour is not used to make chili, or the type of shoes a culprit is wearing. Mycroft Holmes also possessed greater innate abilities (intellect and deductive insights), but was held back by his laziness; Ambrose is paralyzed by his profound phobias that are even more severe than Adrian's.
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