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Is Dolores Umbridge Really Only 4 years Older than Harry Potter?



Harry Potter was born in 1980.


According to the Harry Potter Wiki, it stats that Dolores Umbridge was born, at the latest, in 1976, but was born sometime in the 1970s. At the outside of the range, born in 1970, she's 10 years older than Harry Potter. At the inside, she's 4 years older than he is.


Is she really under thirty? If so, is there any particular reason she looks older? (Imelda Staunton, who plays her, was born in 1956.) And how is she so far into her career if she's really that young at the time?


EDIT: At this point, there is no reference to an actual birth year for Umbridge. Knowing the nature of a wiki, at the time I asked this question, I should have included a screenshot to show the birth date information as it was at the time.



Answer



It looks like JKR will never give us the exact age, but almost 100% certainly it wasn't "4 years older than Harry". From Umbridge's biography on Pottermore, we have a rough timeline (with no dates):




  • {{at seventeen}} Dolores joined the Ministry of Magic directly after she left Hogwarts, taking a job as a lowly intern in the Improper Use of Magic Office.

  • ... soon gained her advancement.


  • Before she was thirty, Dolores had been promoted to Head of the office, and it was but a short step from there to ever more senior positions in the management of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

  • As she grew older and harder, and rose higher within the Ministry...



This is the only thing close to chronology we have... so assuming it took a couple of years to get from Head of Office to Fudge's Undersecretary of Nastiness, she was at least 30 years old at the time of OOTP; and more likely closer to 40 or 50 (vs. Harry's 16). But we just don't know either way.


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