Oh, I dunno; in his day, some regarded him as quite attractive from behind.
Mickey Rourke as Charles Bukowski (or his alter-ego, at least):
http://www.mercurycinema.org.au/cteq/bukowski.html
Granted, I think this was pre-boxing for Rourke, but he still doesn’t quite approach Bukowski’s special brand of attractiveness. Matt Dillon played him in another film.
I think pretty much all the actors in Goodfellas look better than the real mobsters. DeNiro and Sorvino are 2 more examples. NYC mobsters are not known for good looks.
BTW, I recently saw a show where they had pictures of Karen Hill in the 60s and she looked very good, much better than Henry.
Jean Smart… also way better looking thatn Aileen Wuornos.
Robot Arm stole mine. Whe the TV movie about Pancho Barnes came out, I was excited. I had just read a book about Barnes, who was a genuinely fascinating character. The book had plenty of pictures, proving that Pancho was - to put it generously - homely. However, everybody who knew her insisted that she was an attractive person despite her looks. Proof of this was her several very handsome husbands and boyfriends.
Imagine my disappointment when I found that Valerie Bertinelli had been cast as Pancho. Bertinilli is physically attractive, of course, but … bland. Which Pancho never was.
I always thought Julie Kavner would have been a great casting choice as Pancho Barnes, BTW. She would still have been more attractive than the real Pancho (who really was homely, as I said), but not so much so as to be ridiculous.
Rhys Meyers also started acting at a young age, so the skinny, somewhat androgynous look he has in his early films is partially because he was really just a kid. I believe he was only 18 or 19 when Velvet Goldmine was filmed.
Thinking of Velvet Goldmine, the character Ewan McGregor plays is not exactly a real person but maybe close enough for this thread. The character is a highly fictionalized composite of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, and his hairstyle and costumes are clearly based on circa 1973 Iggy Pop. I’d say Ewan McGregor is way better looking than either of these men.
Wasn’t hideous?
She had a mustache. Literally.
Posing can do wonders. In other pictures (and paintings) I’ve seen, Lawrence had a REALLY prominent more-than-Leno-esque chin.
I know, the names were changed in the movie, but that was basically it.
WOW! That is a kick-ass web site, thanks for the link! I could spend hours and hours there. Just the Titanic page is fascinating by itself. I had no idea that there was a black man who died. And to learn that he was traveling with his white wife and two young daughters. Interracial marriage was practically unknown back then. He put them on a lifeboat and stayed behind. So sad.
In a cursory look at that site, I’d say Brandon Teena was much better looking than Hilary Swank’s portrayal.
Based on the picture in this thread, I also think that Virginia Woolfe was much better looking than Nicole Kidman’s portrayal, though not Nicole in real life.
For the most part, yeah, but Oscar ‘Happy’ Felsch was a hunk.
The real emperor doesn’t look too bad to me, he just had really ugly glasses.
He’s at least a little bit based on Mick Ronson, who was Bowie’s guitarist during the “Ziggy” era. Wild and Ronson fronted bands called “The Rats,” and Bowie notoriously played Ronson’s guitar with his mouth in a manner suggestive of fellatio, similar to a scene with Slade and Wild. Also, Wild was shown as being largely forgotten and embittered toward Slade in the '80s, when Reed was a well-regarded rock icon while Iggy was actually enjoying the greatest commercial success of his career, largely due to Bowie. Ronson, although still an active musician and producer, was the only one of the three who could have reasonably been said to have been toiling in obscurity.
I’d say McGregor is better looking than Mick Ronson was, too.
While the Curt Wild character was partially inspired by Ronson, there’s another minor character who was also obviously based on Mick Ronson: Brian Slade’s guitarist Trevor. (He has the line towards the beginning about how it used to be trendy to wear a long gray coat and listen to Led Zeppelin.) I can’t find a picture of the Trevor character online, but I think the actor did look a good bit like Ronson. They even gave him the same hairstyle.
[hijack]
A bit of truly trivial trivia: Mick is NOT the father of Mark and Samantha Ronson. I know, so who asked? but that bit of misinformation has somehow gotten put on numerous web pages so I thought I’d do a little pro-active ignorance fighting. Mark Ronson, DJ, artist and producer (Christina Aguilera, Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen, Robbie Williams, Nikka Costa) and his younger sister Samantha, DJ, artist, unwilling focus of gossip and paparazzi, are the step-children of Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones.[/hijack]
[HIJACK]
I’ve seen Bangles Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson do this (substitute “suggestive of fellatio” with “suggestive of cunnilingus”)- Hoffs on her knees face level with Peterson’s naughty bits, starts with the guitar pick in her hands then with the guitar pick in her mouth.
It was hawt!
[/HIJACK]
In “Bully” (one of my favorite movies) based on a true-crime case, the girls involved in the murder of a bully are all really sexy - in real life (you can see the photos of the real people, online) they were quite homely. Also, the movie had Nick Stahl play the role of the bully - in real life he was like 250 pounds of muscle, and Iranian.
Not so much a good-looking vs. bad-looking issue, but one of badly-different body types: Leonardo DiCaprio is apparently set to play Theodore Roosevelt:
Wow, that’s really weird. I can’t see him playing Teddy at all.