The 27 Most Controversial Movie Characters

Steve Burns

Treating the 1970s New York gay community with all the delicacy of a hammer with a smiley face drawn on the flat end, Cruising is a clumsy mish-mash of stereotypes and titilation that sparked big protests on release.

Pacino's delirious undercover cop hits Manhattan's gay night spots to nab a queer serial killer (whose only motivation appears to be his homosexuality). Then, case close, we see Pacino still hitting up the same bars, and a suggestion that he's gone native and starting killing too. Think Se7en reshot as a wish-fulfillment for Daily Mail readers.

Caligula

Malcolm MacDowell's petulant and rapacious emperor is an onscreen tyrant, the centre of a depraved, orgiastic Roman decadence.

And if anything, the film itself was even worse - Penthouse boss Bob Guccione bankrolled the film on the condition that more sex be added, kick-starting a series of disasters that saw both the writer and director leave the production, the addition of full-on hardcore sex scenes, and a series of post-release lawsuits.

Charles Foster Kane

The enigmatic figure at the centre of Orson Welles' masterpiece bore such close parallels to media magnate William Randolph Hearst (a proto-Rupert Murdoch) that Hearst waged a campaign to have the film discredited or destroyed.

He ordered his newspapers not to cover the film, tried to buy the negative to prevent its release, and, according to Welles himself, attempted to snare the director in a honey trap - he had a naked underage girl and photographers waiting for Welles at his hotel room, which he only avoided thanks to a tip-off.

Frank

The intensity of Dennis Hopper's snarling fetishist makes him a tough watch for the seediest of viewers. We've seen the perversions before, but never like this , with hair-trigger switches from grasping sexual dependent to raging, murdering rapist.

Sebastian

Mixing racial stereotypes with anthropomorphisation requires a careful hand (as Disney, purveyors of animation's most ethnically dubious crows , should know better than anyone), and Ariel's Caribbean pal Sebastian is drawn with a curmudgeonly fist.

"Up on the shore they work all day" he sings, the workshy Jamaican so-and-so, "Out in the sun they slave away, while we're devoting full time to floating under the sea." Enlightened indeed.

Lolita

Production code regulations and the influence of the Catholic League Of Decency prevented Stanley Kubrick from putting the full weight of Professor Humbert Humbert's erotic relationship with the 14-year-old Lolita onscreen (had he known at the start, he later said, he wouldn't have made the film).

But what is there - Sue Lyon's unnervingly lascivious gaze, and her constant chugging from Coke bottles - is more than enough to make audiences shuffle in their seats almost 50 years on.

Travis Bickle

The unhinged nightcrawler in Martin Scorsese's electric New York nightmare cuts a controversial onscreen figure, plunging into an isolated post-Vietnam madness that leads him through porno theatres, attempted political assassinations, underage hookers and eventually to a bloody, cathartic explosion of vigilantism.

But Travis' dangerous streak runs deeper than that. Not only was he based on a real-life loner turned political assassin Arthur Bremer , but his actions were used in the successful insanity plea defence of John Hinckley Jr, who shot President Reagan in 1981. Hinckley told a jury he was emulating Travis and trying to impress Jodie Foster. ("It was the greatest love offering in the history of the world.")