Biography movies about famous people

Beatty is terrifying in his rages, deluded in his belief he can kill Mussolini, yet gentle and kind with his family and friend Meyer Lansky. A brilliant actor ready for the performance of his lifetime, stuck with a weak script, a cowardly director not willing to show his subject warts and all, Robert Downey Jr. Sadly neither the director nor script took advantage of Downey being so far into character; the actor was gone, Chaplin remained.

With an edgy actor such as Downey, why explore the more controversial aspects of his life? They had an actor ready to cut loose and they failed him. Is it possible to humanize Hitler, possibly the most hated and evil man to ever exist? Hands shaking, frail, obviously drugged heavily, he knows the end is near and what is coming; he knows what the reaction will be to his Death Camps.

Often gentle and kind with those around him, other time he flies into a rage when his orders are not followed. In the end, the monster was all too human, just a man. An astounding, brave performance. The moment we laid eyes on him in the opening moments of the film, and he spoke in that surprising high reedy voice, audiences felt they were encountering Abraham Lincoln, possibly the greatest American who ever lived.

Daniel Day-Lewis poured over books, found descriptions of his voice, his gait, the manner in which he spoke and the deep melancholy he carried with him and brought it with him to his performance. This profoundly fine performance won the actor his third Academy Awards for Best Actor. As the young Howard Hughes during his Hollywood years, before the madness set in, Leonardo DiCaprio is truly outstanding.

Fascinated with aviation, he built planes, making them bigger and faster, crashing one of them in downtown LA, forever damaging himself. It is a bold, outstanding performance that beautifully explores a troubled mind. The genuine fear in his eyes when he has one of his spells is truly frightening because he is never really sure if he can snap out of it.

In portraying the purely evil yet charismatic Idi Amin Dada, actor Forest Whitaker gave a performance for the ages, winning every single award available to him that year. Paul Schrader tackles the life, career and incredibly violent death of Japanese writer and artist Yukio Mishima in a film that shows a good biopic can make dramatic hay from even the most unlikeable figures.

David Lynch tamped down his surrealist impulses for his first major studio film, but when the source material is the true story of a 19th century freakshow exhibit turned bon vivant, what dreamy embellishments do you really need? And while it might play more conventionally than just about anything Lynch did after, the director still imbues the film with a signature sense of unease.

Flawed geniuses make great biopic subjects. Flawed heroes maybe even more so. General George S Patton, a hard-charging tank commander during World War II, is definitely one of the latter and depending on which historian you ask, maybe the former too. Embodied by the hardly mild-mannered George C Scott, a role for which he won, and subsequently declined, an Oscar, his wartime experiences make an electrifying case study of almost deranged drive and purpose.

Cillian Murphy is simply that captivating as J Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the weapon that may still annihilate us all, and the movie is simply that big: a three-hour exploration of guilt, war, death and marriage that overwhelms your attention with sheer density. Specifically, a slave revolt against the Romans led by a Thracian slave in 71 BC.

It came with uncanny historical resonance, too: screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood 10 and for a time, was denied credit on the film. His Spartacus moment took a lot longer to happen, but he got a much happier ending and a Bryan Cranston film made about him. Flee , about Afghan refugee Amin Nawab, is another.

But Marjane Satrapi's adaptation of her own graphic novel about her childhood in Iran may be the best of the lot. It follows a young Satrapi as she tries to coexist peacefully with the Iranian Revolution, a feat made much tougher by her, a being a woman, and b having a mind of her own. A hidden life no more. But Apted and stars Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones string the familiar narrative together with such well-observed humanity that it feels less like standard Hollywood biography and something closer to a folk tale.

Six different actors portray various Dylanesque personae, none of them actually named Bob Dylan. Most memorable is Cate Blanchett as folk singer Jude Quinn, basically an alternate-reality version of Dylan circa his electric conversion. Actors have gone to great lengths in prepping to play historical figures before. Which may, thinking about it, have been a carriage.

Legislation drafting has never been this exciting. Not even the trashiest Lifetime screenwriter could script a scandal as perfect as the one that enveloped US figure skating in all-American ice princess Nancy Kerrigan is clubbed in the knee by an unknown assailant. The suspect? Her chief rival, trailer park roughneck Tonya Harding.

It was world-class tabloid fodder — but tabloids, of course, have little use for nuance or empathy. This movie was a huge success and nabbed Reese Witherspoon , as June Carter, an Oscar win , in part due to the faithfully realistic characterization by Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash—who used his own singing voice in the performance.

For people who grew up in the '90s, this is a foundational biopic. With Angela Bassett in an absolutely ferocious performance as Tina Turner and an unsparing look at abuse and domestic violence, it proves that movies about real people can be anything but one dimensional. The only Alfred Hitchcock film to be based on true events, this is drawn from a real-life horror story wherein an innocent man played by Henry Fonda is mistaken for a criminal and is arrested for crimes he didn't commit.

The thriller is vice-like, twisting around and around until the viewer is just as panicked as Fonda. In her role, she writes stories that are syndicated by MSN and other outlets. In addition to her stories reaching millions of readers, content she's written and edited has qualified for a Bell Ringer Award and received a Communicator Award. She covers a wide breadth of topics: she's written about how to find the very best petite jeans , how sustainable travel has found its footing on Instagram , and what it's like to be a professional advice-giver in the modern world.

Her personal essays have run the gamut from learning to dress as a queer woman to navigating food allergies as a mom. She speaks at writing-related events and podcasts about freelancing and journalism, mentors students and other new writers, and consults on coursework. Currently, Katherine lives in Boston with her husband and two kids, and you can follow her on Instagram.

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Biography movies about famous people

By Liz Doupnik Published 22 January By Sadie Bell Published 15 January The Netflix Western would hardly be the first limited series to come back. One of the more fictionalized biopics on the list, this Oscar-winning epic, adapted from a Tony Award—winning play, takes the unique approach of showing the life, work, and peculiarities that laugh!

As played by F. Murray Abraham, Salieri is consumed by jealousy, revulsion, and deep, deep admiration for his rival composer. The film explores the ups and downs of his fighting career, his mob connections including an infamously thrown fight in , and the always tumultuous, often rage-filled, and violent relationships he had with his wife, Vikie, and his brother and manager, Joey.

De Niro won his second Oscar for playing LaMotta—a performance for which he gained 60 pounds to play an older version of the fighter. Watch on Max. In the s, big, booming historical epics were all the rage. Lawrence of Arabia , Dr. Zhivago —if it had a musical overture and an intermission, people were there and all about it. It was kind of weird.

But one biographical film that came a little later in stands out as an especially successful epic with a number of historical figures criss-crossing at a monumentally important historical event: the start of the Russian Revolution. And throughout, all of the individuals featured and events chronicled are given color through real-life interviews with men and women who were actually there.

This biopic is straight vibes. Converse sneakers are famously seen in the background of a shot. This Nora Ephron —directed biopic earns inclusion on this list first and foremost thanks to a truly iconic performance from the great Meryl Streep as the beloved chef, author, and television personality Julia Child.