Raised in Sunnydale, from a rich family, Cordelia is the person to know if you want to be considered cool in Sunnydale. She tries to befriend Buffy on her first day at school, but Buffy is more interested ion losers Willow and Xander.
Once she discovers that Buffy is the slayer she starts hanging with more and more often and, to the disgust of her friends, starts dating Xander Harris. They broke up, however, when she caught Xander and Willow smooching. This did nothing for her street cred at school but she soon got back in with her friends.
Cordelia's father, however, wasn't too good at keeping his accounts update and hasn't paid his taxes for the last 12 years. The taxman soon catches up with him and Cordelia loses everything and moves to L.A. to become an actress.
Here she meets Angel and gets herself a job as his assistant and a nice apartment which happens to be haunted. When Angel's another assistant sacrifices his life to save the world, he kisses Cordelia and passes on his gift for visions. Having the visions brings about a change in Cordelia, although still the sassy girl with an eye for designer clothes and very little tact, she realises that there are a lot of people that need Angel's help.
When the Angel Investigations office blows up, Cordelia allows the team to run from her apartment until they find another building. Cleaning aside, she is all too pleased when Angel finds an abandoned hotel to run their team from. As the visions continue to take their toll, Cordelia successfully hides their effects from the rest of the team and manages to persuade Angel to take Gunn on as a fully paid member of the team.
When Angel's inability to save Darla leads him to the darker side of his character and the sacking of his staff, Cordelia takes his betrayal very personally but keeps Angel Investigations going along with Wesley and Gunn. Even when Angel has is epiphany and returns to the fold, Cordelia finds it hard to forgive until he buys her clothes.
When she gets a vision of a librarian in trouble the team manage to open a portal to Pylea, the hosts home dimension and out of it pops a beast and Lorne's cousin Landok. When the team try and send Landok back home, Cordelia is taken along with her and finds herself in the human unfriendly Pylea.
Here she becomes a human slave until her visions lead the Pyleans to believe that she is their long awaited princess. As princess she must Com Shuk with the Groosalugg which doesn't sound pleasant at all, until she meets the rather handsome and manly Groosalugg himself. However, when she learns that mating with him will lead to her passing on the visions, she declines, and with the help of team Angel, leaves her kingdom in Groo's safe hands.
Back in LA, Cordelia begins to have feelings for Angel, though she doesn't know it herself. The vision effect worsen and worsen until, on her birthday no less, a particular hefty vision leaves her in a coma. Her astrally projected self is offered a choice, to continue having the visions, which were never meant for humans, and to die young, or to lead an alternate path that she could have taken when she reached LA had she not bumped into Angel. Offered cake or death, she chooses cake and, although her new TV star life is all she ever hoped she feels something is missing and opts to have her old life back. In return for her heroism, she is offered the choice to have pain-free vision, the price, to become half demon. She takes the offer.
Visions aside, life in LA becomes more complicated when Cordelia becomes surrogate mother to Angel's son, Connor and Groo arrives in town just as Angel is about to declare his feelings for her. After Angel finds them a potion which will prevent Cordelia to lose her visions if she consumates her relationship with Groo, he sends them on a vacation. Cordelia returns to find Connor gone and her feelings for Angel growing, even if she does not know it herself.
When Connor returns, a teenage boy out for revenge on his dad, she manages to calm some of his fear and anger with her new demon power. Finally realising her feelings for Angel she arranges to meet him, however, never makes the date as she ascends from earth to become a Higher Being.
It doesn't take Cordelia long to find that Being Higher is not as fun as it sounds and after, assisting Angel as much as she can from above she somehow manages to return sans memory. Finding that Connor is the only one that will tell her the truth she moves in with him. Her memory is restored with the aid of a spell performed by Lorne, but not only does Cordelia remember her life as a human, she remembers everything she saw as a Higher Being, which includes all of Angelus' ugly past.
With the arrival of the beast and the end of the world drawing near, Cordelia finds comfort in the arms of Connor. Their one night of passion results in Cordelia becoming pregnant and releasing a much Higher Power that has been lying dormant inside her. Having been taken over by this power, Cordelia controls the beast and persuades Angel that the only way to beat this is to become Angelus.
Once Angel's soul has been taken from him in controlled circumstances, she steals his soul so that he remains Angelus. However, Angelus cannot be controlled so easily and soon kills the Beast in revenge for old times. Cordelia has not banked on the power of Willow who returns to restore Angel's soul.
Defeated, Cordelia reveals to the team that she is pregnant, but Angelus has found out her secret and she and Connor run from the hotel. In Connor's abandoned warehouse, Cordelia persuades Connor to kill a girl in order for her to give birth, the team arrive just in time to witness the birth of Cordelia's child. Jasmine, the rather full grown, goddess.
After the birth Cordelia falls into a coma in which she remains throughout the defeat of Jasmine and the team's move to Wolfram & Hart. Despite the best care that money can buy, Cordelia never recovers from her coma and finally passes on. In her death, Cordelia manages one last act of heroism, setting the troubled Angel back on the right path and helping to defeat Lindsey.
