Tywin Lannister
Lord of Casterly Rock and the most feared man in Westeros: the coldest, richest, most calculating lord of his age, thrice Hand of the King and master of the family that pays its debts.
A soul of House Lannister, born at Casterly Rock.
The fuller tale
Season One
Lord of Casterly Rock and the mind actually running House Lannister, whatever the king believes about his own authority. He skins a deer in front of Jaime while explaining, without raising his voice, exactly how thin the family's reputation is and how much of it Jaime is spending. He sends the Mountain raiding along the Trident to answer Ned's justice with worse, and when Robb Stark's army routs his son's host at the Whispering Wood and takes Jaime prisoner, he takes personal command of the war himself, unbothered and unhurried about it.
Season Two
He runs the war from Harrenhal and takes on a new cupbearer, a sharp-tongued orphan girl calling herself Nan, without ever suspecting she is Robb Stark's sister — and finds himself, against his own habits, half enjoying the conversation. He deals with the Mountain's men and the mess they leave behind the way he deals with everything, efficiently and without comment. When Stannis's fleet threatens King's Landing he marches the Lannister-Tyrell relief force in at the last possible hour of the Blackwater, and the city is saved on his timing rather than his son's.
Season Three
Hand of the King again, and using the office the way he always meant to — arranging marriages like troop movements. He forces Tyrion to marry Sansa Stark and Cersei to accept a match with Loras Tyrell, brushing off both their furies as beneath the scale of what the family needs. Behind it he is quietly building the alliance that matters more than either wedding: a pact with Walder Frey and Roose Bolton to end the war in the North in a single night, at a wedding of the Starks' own.
Season Four
He presides over Joffrey's wedding to Margaery Tyrell and, when the boy dies choking at his own feast, over the investigation that settles with practiced speed on Tyrion. He runs the trial like the family business it is, produces Shae to testify against her former lover, and sentences his own son to death without much visible struggle over it. Tyrion, cornered and out of allies, finds him in his own privy and levels a crossbow at him — Tywin's last words underestimate him, and then Tywin is dead in the chair, killed by his son.
Season Five
Tywin lies in the sept; Cersei's childhood prophecy — younger, more beautiful, three children, gold shrouds — lies with him.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Shot on his privy by Tyrion (S4·E10)
The great lion died on the privy in the Tower of the Hand, shot twice with a crossbow by the dwarf son he'd sentenced to death. He went insisting to the end that Tyrion was no son of his. A Lannister's debt, paid in full.
On the page. A crossbow bolt on the privy (ASOS, ch. 78)
Tyrion climbed the privy tower on his escape and found his father where all men are mortal. Two quarrels from a crossbow answered a lifetime of contempt — and Tywin Lannister, in the end, did not shit gold.
He dies on a privy, which the entire realm agrees is the joke he spent his life making impossible. In the show, Jaime frees Tyrion from the black cells on the eve of his execution; Tyrion, instead of fleeing, climbs to the Tower of the Hand, finds Shae in his father's bed and strangles her, then takes the crossbow from the wall and finds Tywin in the privy chamber. Tywin tries to command him, then to bargain, and finally spits that Tyrion is no son of his; the first quarrel is for calling Shae a whore, the second for a lifetime. He dies mid-sentence, still certain the crossbow will not fire.
The books stage the same scene with a crueler key turned in the lock. On the climb out, Jaime confesses the truth about Tysha — she was no hired woman, just a crofter's daughter who loved a boy — and Tyrion goes up the ladder with that in his ears. He asks his father where whores go; Tywin says the word one time too many. A single bolt takes him in the bowels, and the epilogue of his life is the funeral in the Great Sept, where the corpse of the most feared man in Westeros putrefies so spectacularly that mourners flee the smell, and the body seems, in the candlelight, to be smiling. In both tellings the realm's order dies with him — everything Cersei inherits, she breaks.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 2 chapters that name them
A Clash of Kings 2 chapters that name them
A Storm of Swords 5 chapters that name them
A Feast for Crows 3 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Book and show Tywin differ mainly in what surrounds him. The Harrenhal scenes with Arya are pure invention — in the novels Harrenhal's Lannister interlude belongs to Amory Lorch and the Mountain's garrison, and Tywin never exchanges a word with any Stark child. The books also keep the wound that explains the Tyrion relationship at full depth: the story of Tysha, Tyrion's first wife, whom Tywin had his guards brutalize while telling his son she was a hired lie, is cut from the show entirely — and with it the revelation that detonates between the brothers in the third novel. Book Tywin is otherwise the same man with more paperwork: his years as Aerys's Hand, the Reyne-Tarbeck extermination and the sack of King's Landing arrive as history rather than scenes, mostly through other men's uneasy memories.
The show also softens his physical presence into elegance — Charles Dance's whip-thin patriarch, forever skinning or signing something — where the books describe a heavyset man with shaven head and golden side-whiskers who feared baldness less than looking like his laughing father. The verdict on him is identical in both tellings, delivered by Tyrion in each: he made House Lannister supreme and could not make a single member of it love him.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.