Fran

Fran, played by Edi Patterson, is Harlan Thrombey's housekeeper. She discovers Harlan's body and plays a key role in revealing the antagonist of Knives Out. Ransom Drysdale murders her.

Character
Fran has brown hair and brown eyes. Her age and background are unknown, but she has a cousin (unnamed) who works as a receptionist at the local medical examiner's office. Fran works as Harlan's housekeeper. She smokes weed and has a stash of joints hidden in an ornate mantle clock. She mostly uses a Juul given to her by Meg Thrombey. Fran also loves Hallmark movies.

Relationships
Little is known about Fran's relationships with the family, except for Ransom Drysdale, who forces "the help" to call him Hugh (his real name). He calls her Frannie and asks her to do tasks not in her job description. Her relationships with Meg Thrombey and Marta Cabrera are friendly. Meg cries upon learning about Fran's death from Detective Lieutenant Elliott.

According to Benoit Blanc, Fran apparently did love working for Harlan. This makes sense as she did seem to smile and be friendly when she was about to give Harlan his morning breakfast and was stunned finding his dead corpse in his office.
 * Harlan Thrombey (employer; friend)
 * Meg Thrombey (good friend)
 * Marta Cabrera (good friend)
 * Unnamed cousin

Death
Fran is murdered by Ransom after she attempts to blackmail him with Harlan's lab results. Fran witnessed Ransom tampering with Marta's medical bag but wasn't sure what he was doing. After Harlan's death, she theorizes his death was not accidental and get his toxicology report from her cousin at the medical examiner's office. Before her death, she hid a copy of the report with her stash in the mantle clock.

Ransom tries to frame Marta again by injecting Fran with enough morphine to cause an overdose. Marta finds her in the abandoned coin-operated laundromat and attempts to revive her. Fran is taken to the hospital, but she ultimately does not survive.

Her death sends Ransom to prison longer than his arson and attempted murder would.

Harlan Thrombey's Demise
Fran finds Harlan's body after his suicide. Her love of Hallmark movies leads her to believe his death is actually a murder, and she cites the plot of Deadly by Surprise (a fake movie) featuring Danica McKellar, a real actress who starred in several Hallmark movies. Deadly by Surprise, as described by Fran, somewhat foreshadows the ending of Knives Out: "...a wife who gets poisoned by her husband but bit by bit so she thinks she's going crazy and she ends up killing herself."undefined

Trivia

 * Despite the movie centering on the death of Harlan Thrombey, Fran is the only character in the movie that actually gets murdered as Harlan really did commit suicide. When the mystery unfolds, its revealed that there was a murder mystery going on, it was just for her and not Harlan. Clever!