The feminine form is "confidante"
It is a character in a drama or novel who plays only a minor role in the action, but serves the protagonist as a trusted friend to whom he or she confesses intimate thoughts, problems, and feelings.
In drama the confidant provides the playwright for communicating to the audience the knowledge, state of mind, and intentions of a principal character without the use of stage devices such as the soliloquy or the aside.
Examples are Hamlet's friend Horatio in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Cleopatra's maid Charmion in his Antony and Cleopatra.
In prose fiction a famed confidant is Dr. Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle's
stories about Sherlock Holmes (1887 and following).
The device is particularly useful to those modern writers who, like Henry James, have largely renounced the novelist's earlier privileges of having access to a character's state of mind and of intruding into the narrative in order to address such information directly to the reader.
James applied to the confidant the term ficelle, French for the string by which the puppeteer manages his puppets.
Discussing Maria Gostrey, Strether's confidante in The Ambassadors, James remarks that she is a "ficelle" who is not, "in essence, Strether's friend. She is the reader's friend much rather. "
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