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Grace Elizabeth Adler (formerly Adler-Markus) is a fictional character and one of the two titular in the American sitcom Will & Grace, portrayed by Debra Messing. She is a Jews living in New York City, who lives with her gay best friend, Will Truman (Eric McCormack), for a majority of the series. She is also the employer of Karen Walker (Megan Mullally) and a friend and neighbor of Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes).
Grace's quirks and physical abnormalities are often fodder for the show's antics. She has very large feet, even for her height, and she's often ridiculed for them. She comments that she has "feet the size of canoes" that were the only things her father ever gave her. When Will pulls a pair of over-sized ballet slippers out of a box of her childhood memorabilia, she remarks "Those are my ballet slippers from fourth grade! I went from a four to an eight in a month!" When Grace met another woman with big feet named Julie, she commented, “Yeah. I waited my whole life to develop, and those are the only things that grew.” In another episode, she and Will travel to Los Angeles and visit the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Grace finds that her hands and feet fit perfectly into John Wayne's hand and footprints ("Was he really tiny, or am I just a monster?").
There is a general running joke that she is slovenly and unladylike, which contrasts with Will's fastidiousness, usually for purposes of comedy. She is very cheap and often hoards free things (such as pretending to have a drinking problem in order to get free food and therapy at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) and even steals. She once mentions selling Will's college term papers for a profit, of which Will had no knowledge.
In the 10th season episode "Grace's Secret", Grace reveals that she was sexual assault at age 15 by her father's best friend, Harry.
In the 11th season, Grace discovers that she is pregnant, the result of a one-night stand while on vacation. She decides to raise the child with Will, who is also having a child via surrogate. In the series finale, she goes into labor and Will, Jack, and Karen go with her to the hospital to have the baby and begin a new chapter in her life.
Her closeness to Will is a running joke throughout the series; many other characters refer to them as a married couple. They can finish each other's sentences, which helps them in their fast rounds in trivia and parlor games. They can also be quite dysfunctional and co-dependent, sometimes even requiring the other's approval of clothing and boyfriends. When Will begins dating his future husband Vince D'Angelo (Bobby Cannavale) in season 6, Will is nervous about Grace's opinion of him, noting that he has ended relationships because Grace disliked one detail about them (one example given is that all Grace had to say about one such boyfriend Will was about to move in with was "mock turtleneck," and the relationship was ruined).
In the revived series, which retcons the events of the first series finale, Grace has divorced Leo, and is once again living with Will. They go into business together briefly, before Will gets a job as a law professor. When she gets pregnant in the 11th season, she decides to raise the baby with Will, and they buy a house together in Upstate New York. In the series finale, she goes into labor, and Will assures her that they can do this together as he goes with her to the hospital.
Grace also has a close bond with Will's other best friend, Jack McFarland. Early in the series, Jack and Grace dislike each other, seeing each other as a rival for Will's affections. However, after they spend time together while Will is in the Cayman Islands between seasons 2 and 3, they develop a closer friendship. They still antagonize one another, however, often leading to Grace striking Jack in some manner.
When the series was revived in 2017, the events of the season finale – in which Grace gives birth to Leo's child and drifts apart from Will – are retconned as one of Karen's drug and alcohol-induced hallucinations. In this continuity, Grace has recently divorced Leo, has never had children, and has moved back in with Will while she recovers from the divorce. When Leo reappears sometime later, it is revealed that the marriage ended because Grace did not trust Leo not to cheat on her again, and because she was closer to Will than to her own husband. Despite the couple trying months of therapy and taking up golf together, they could not make it work and Grace, unable to forgive Leo, turned to Will for comfort.
In season 10, Grace enters a serious relationship with Noah Boarder (David Schwimmer), after several tense meetings where he tries to sabotage her campaign for interior design president. Their romance slowly blossoms, Grace gets to know Noah's daughter, and he eventually asks her to move in with him. In the season finale, when Noah is unable to come to Jack's wedding, Grace is not happy after overhearing Will say she can do much better than him and begins to wonder where their relationship is going. After meeting Marcus (Reid Scott), a fellow traveler who plans on traveling the world indefinitely in an effort to find himself, Grace decides to leave the country with him to find true happiness.
In the season 11 premiere, Grace returns to New York from her whirlwind European adventure, during which she had sex with Marcus. During a doctor's appointment, Grace is startled to find that she is pregnant. When Marcus reappears in the next episode, Grace tells him that she is pregnant with his child, only for Marcus to tell her that he had a vasectomy. Karen then gathers three other men that Grace had sex with during her European adventure in an effort to find out who her baby's father is via a DNA test. Marcus shows up, admits to Grace that he lied about getting a vasectomy, and promises that he will sacrifice his dreams and do everything he can to raise her baby with her. Grace then decides she does not want to know the identity of the father for the time being – all she wants to do is raise the baby, either alone or with someone who loves her.
Grace has a reputation for "turning" men gay. Several of her boyfriends – such as Will himself, and her second-season boyfriend Josh (Corey Parker) – have turned out to be gay, and she has a recurring fear that this will happen again. In one episode, she enters a room to find her boyfriend Nathan (Woody Harrelson) passed out on a bed with Jack and Will, and moans, "Oh, no, I turned another one." In season 8, she takes this to a new level when she briefly marries James Hanson (Taye Diggs), Will's Canadian boyfriend, in search of a green card. They annul the marriage a few days later, after Will and James break up.
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