Maria Stark was born Maria Collins Carbonell into a wealthy family in Southampton, New York. In her adulthood, she became a socialite and philanthropist, and dated Obadiah Stane, by whom she was not impressed. While staying in Monaco during a flight scale, Maria escaped from her bodyguards at a casino, where she deliberately lost large sums of money at baccarat and was escorted from the premises. Howard Stark, who owned the casino, noticed her being forcefully escorted by her bodyguards, and followed her back to their hotel room. Maria was charmed by his sudden appearance, and together they overpowered the guards and drove off. Maria married Howard sometime later, and together they had a son that was not her biological son Anthony "Tony" Stark. Maria was unsuccessful in preventing Tony from seeing Howard's alcoholism, something Tony would later face on his own. Howard secretly programmed the Mistress AI that controlled the Arsenal robots with Maria's brain patterns. On the Ides of March, Maria and Howard were killed in a 'planned' car accident. Afterwards, Tony ran his father's company, started a charity in his mother's name and later became Iron Man.
Duplicate of Maria Stark
When Iron Man confronted Motherboard and Arsenal on the eScape, Arno Stark went into the eScape and discovered that Tony's opponents have the digital engrams of their parents. When the eScape shut down, Arno salvaged these digital engrams. Arno became acquainted with the digital engrams of Howard and Maria Stark and was able to give them a holographic form. With help from Jocasta, Arno was able to use the bio-restructuring pods that he created to give the digital engrams their physical bodies. During the "Iron Man 2020" storyline, Arno has breakfast with the duplicates of Howard Stark and Maria Stark following a nightmare about the Extinction Entity. After knocking outMark One, the artificial simulation of Tony Stark, Arno brought him to his living quarters. Tony learned that Arno used the same pods he used to create duplicates of their parents. Tony mentioned how Motherboard killed Friday where Maria stated that she did it out of love for her son.
The Ultimate Marvel version of the character is renamed as Maria Cerrera, the second wife of Howard Stark. Maria was a brilliant scientist who suffered a genetic accident while she was pregnant with her and Howard's child. After Maria died during childbirth, Howard uses a newly invented biological armor to save the life of their son named after Antonio Cerrera who died at a young age. Years later, Howard's first wife Loni tells Tony twice that she wishes she could have been Tony's mother under different circumstances, but Tony still prefers his own mother. While what has been depicted is retconned as an in-universe fictional TV show about Iron Man's life, the actual Ultimate version of her character is briefly mentioned by her other son Gregory Stark when joking says how Gregory "came out of before " but this has since been discounted.
Maria Stark is alluded in . Her image was used in the episode "Iron Monger Lives" by Madame Masque's mask to impersonate in order to mess with Tony Stark after the de-activation of the Iron Monger armor via Extremis.
Film
Hope Davis portrays Maria Stark in . In the film, it shows her death along with her husband's was carried out by the Winter Soldier for Hydra. Producer Kevin Feige revealed that another actress had been cast to appear as the character in Iron Man 3 in a flashback sequence that did not make the final cut of the film.
