Krusty The Klown
Artistic Licence: By all accounts, Rusty Nails (real name: James Allen) was a nice guy. Krusty's cantankerous personality is very much a Simpsons invention.
Boris Lermontov
The Character: Ballet impresario played by Anton Walbrook in The Red Shoes , whose obsessive desire to get the best out of star dancer Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) drives the latter to her death.
The Inspiration: The relationship between the two echoes the efforts of Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, and British dancer Diana Gould.
Artistic Licence: Diaghilev actually died before Gould could take up his offer to join the Ballet Russes, so pretty much all of the film is fictional.
Kit Carruthers
The Character: James Dean lookalike drifter played by Martin Sheen in Badlands , who charms Holly (Sissy Spacek) by killing her abusive dad and then leading her on a cross-country crime spree.
The Inspiration: Teenage killer Charles Starkweather 'did a Badlands' in the 1950s with accomplice Caril Ann Fugate.
Artistic Licence: Terrence Malick downplayed the gruesomeness of Starkweather's spree, which included strangling and stabbing Fugate's two-year-old step-sister.
Steve Zissou
The Character: Bill Murray plays Wes Anderson's oceanographer and documentarian, creator of the Life Aquatic series of films.
The Inspiration: Fairly obviously, Zissou is modelled on Jacques Cousteau, whose fashion combo of blue dungarees and red hat were lifted wholesale by Anderson.
Artistic Licence: Cousteau never went on a hunt to blow up a jaguar shark with dynamite.
Dolores Haze
The Character: Precocious girl - better known as Lolita - who becomes the object of paedophile Humbert Humbert's perverted affection. She has been played on-screen by Sue Lyon and Dominique Swain.
The Inspiration: Some scholars have suggested that the novel's author, Vladimir Nabokov, based Lolita on Florence Horner, an 11-year-old girl kidnapped by a paedophile in 1948.
Artistic Licence: Lolita 's plot device of a road trip around America is similar to the real-life case, although the fact that Humbert is Dolores' stepfather changes the dynamic considerably.
Miss Piggy
The Character: Cinema's greatest puppet diva and frog fancier.
The Inspiration: Muppet designer Bonnie Erickson originally named the character Miss Piggy Lee, in homage to jazz singer Peggy Lee.
Artistic Licence: The comparisons go no further - Erickson and her fellow Muppeteers quietly dropped the Lee because nobody wanted to offend a star they admired.
Harry Powell
The Character: Crooked Reverend, played by a frightening Robert Mitchum in The Night Of The Hunter , who swaps 'Love' for 'Hate' in the hunt for hidden loot.
The Inspiration: Harry Powers, a 'Lonely Hearts' serial killer who seduced and murdered widows (and sometimes their children) for their cash in 1930s America.
Artistic Licence: The film offers a happier ending, as a widow's children do a runner with the money and lead Powell to his doom.
Ebenezer Scrooge
The Character: Alistair Sim, Michael Caine and Jim Carrey are just three of the stars to tackle Dickens' Yuletide miser, who mends his ways after experiencing A Christmas Carol .
The Inspiration: 18th century politician John Elwes who protected his inheritance by adopting the Scrooge-like characteristic of going to bed at dusk to save on candles.
Artistic Licence: All that stuff about being visited by ghosts on Christmas Eve sets Scrooge apart.
Barry Egan
The Character: Adam Sandler's greatest role sees him driven to distraction by his feelings for free-spirited Emily Watson in Punch-Drunk Love .
The Inspiration: Barry's scheme to claim millions of Frequent Flyer miles due to a loophole in a promotion for puddings mirrors the real-life example of David Phillips.
Artistic Licence: When not flying to Hawaii to woo Watson, Barry is being extorted by a phone sex scam - a detail that we assume writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson didn't base on Phillips.
Hanna Schmitz
The Character: Kate Winslet's role in The Reader as the Nazi war criminal engaged in an affair with a teenage student won the actress her only Oscar to date.
The Inspiration: Ilse Koch, the "Beast of Buchenwald" was the wife of the commandment at the infamous concentration camp, and later tried for her crimes.
Artistic Licence: The central plot about Hanna's affair with Michael Berg (David Kross) is entirely fictional.
