So TIL about Charles Lightoller, who led what can only be called an eventful life. He was an officer on the Titanic and then went on to serve in WW1 and piloted a small civilian craft in the Dunkirk evacuation:
In the process he actually had two events in his life portrayed in film, once in the film Titanic (and other portrayals of the sinking) and again, for a different bit of his life, in the film Dunkirk (although the character was actually not called Charles Lightoller, it was canonically based on him and largely matches his real life experience, though presumably the change was due to the fact that the real Charles Lightoller did not take a random kid with him to Dunkirk and get him killed)
So what other examples of this are there, where some random minor real life figure who is not one of the “great and the good” (e.g. Queen Elizabeth, Churchill, Lincoln, Caesar etc.) or even famous at all (e.g. Wyatt Earp, Elvis, Elliot Ness) or infamous (e.g. Billy the Kid, Al Capone, Dick Turpin) is portrayed multiple times in film?
The Roman soldier who poked Jesus on the cross has been depicted numerous times, most famously by John Wayne.
ETA - “real life figure” is debatable. I should read more carefully.
The six Marines in the iconic “Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima” photograph have been portrayed in several films: Sands of Iwo Jima, The Outsider, and Flags of Our Fathers.
I havent seen this film, but I see Charlton Heston played John the Baptist
I assume all his scenes were shot waste deep in a river to keep him from chewing up the set. I love Chuck, but I can just imagine him as John the Baptist
So one person who possibly counts is Dave Toschi the detective who investigated the Zodiac killer and who dirty harry is based on.
Other than famously being portrayed by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, he was also portrayed by Mark Ruffalo (including a scene where the fictionalized Dave Toschi watched the even more fictionalized version of him in Dirty Harry)
It’s a little more dubious as unlike Mr Dawson in Dunkirk (where almost all the main events occurred to the IRL Lightoller), Dirty Harry is only very roughly based on Toschi.
The was a documentary about this last week on (I think) the Smithsonian Channel. At least one of the flag raisers was misidentified,and it wasn’t until recently that things were straightened out.
There’s probably a couple of examples like this. I thought maybe Dick Winters or one of the other Band Of Brothers characters had been portrayed in other films like Longest Day or other WW2 but can’t immediately see that.
Do spouses count? In pretty much every movie about Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln shows up. She’s famous, yes, but famous for being the wife of Lincoln.
There are a number of characters tangentially related to the JFK assassination who have been portrayed in multiple films. E.g. David Ferrie has been a character in the films JFK, Ruby and The Irishman.
