50 Movie Characters You Won't Believe Are Real People

Features
By published

Only the names have been changed

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.