Ranking All Main Characters From Boardwalk Empire
10. Margaret Schroeder
Every show about gangsters needs an honest bastion of goodness; a character just looking to keep their head down, stay safe and protect those around them. In the case of Margaret Schroeder (later Thompson), all she ever wanted was to get her truly horrible husband some work - and the rest wrote itself with tragedies and triumphs.
Not content with becoming the wife of a mobster, throughout the show Margaret moves with the same virtues she started the series with. As part of the Women's Temperance Movement, it was engaging in the third season to watch her character be one of the driving forces for programs in hospitals offering proper care for women's health and hygiene - something that was lambasted by many others at the time.
In the fourth and fifth seasons, her absence in Atlantic City is sorely missed - but the character was swept away to New York, and the show allowed her to carry out more of her own adventures.
Margaret was one of the few characters the show actively cheered for, and despite entering the series a victim and someone to take pity on, her promotion to an independent and powerful figure was truly the only fictional character in the series to get a happy ending.