I’m using Denzel Washington and Angela Bassett as a starting point.
Off the top of my head I had Malcom X, Rueben ‘Hurricane’ Carter, and Stephen Biko(Cry Freedom). Then I had a look at the IMDB page and saw
Frank Lucas (American Gangster)
Coach Herman Boone (Remember the Titans)
Melvin B. Tolson (The Great Debaters)
George McKenna (The George McKenna Story(TV movie))
Robert Eldridge (Wilma) Rudolph
Angela Basset has played Tine Turner, Dr. Betty Shabazz, Rosa Parks, Katherine Jackson, Cheryl McNair(Challenger disaster widow) and Voletta Wallace(Biggie’s mom). Half credit for Michelle Obama on the Simpsons.
So 8 and 6, actor and actress. Who bests these two?
Helen Mirren has played a variety of queens, including Elizabeth I and II, Charlotte Sophia and Caesonia. A lot of her work is in the grey area between Shakespeare/classical histories and tragedies, and I’m not fully sure if some of them are fictional or not (The Queen in Moses, Prince of Egypt? Ophelia and Gertrude in Hamlet? I could go either way on either of these). She also played Ayn Rand and a bunch of characters that may be real people to some degree.
Vincent D’Onofrio has played Orson Welles, Abbie Hoffman and Robert E. Howard.
Anthony Hopkins has played Ernest Hemingway, Burt Munro, Ptolemy, Daniel Webster, Richard I, Charles Dickens, David Lloyd George, Siegfried Farnon, Bruno Hauptmann, Yitzhak Rabin, Col John Frost, Frederick Treves, Adolf Hitler, Paul of Tarsus, William Bligh, Galeazzo Ciano, Frank Doel, Donald Campbell, C. S. Lewis, Dr. John Kellogg, Richard Nixon, Pablo Picasso, John Quincy Adams, George Washington, John Winthrop, and William Radcliffe.
Charlton Heston portrayed Moses, Andrew Jackson (twice), Brigham Young, Michelangelo, John the Baptist, Sir Thomas More, Josef Mengele, Cardinal Richelieu, Robert Devereaux (Earl of Essex), Chinese Gordon, Thomas Jefferson, Henry VIII, Mark Antony (twice) and did voicework for Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Kahn, and other lesser known real people, and this isn’t including his stagework.
Michael Sheen is nowhere near the record holder (though he has played several actual people) but I’ll give him honorable mention for having portrayed Tony Blair in three completely unrelated vehicles. Peter O’Toole played Henry II in the movie adaptations of two unrelated plays (The Lion in Winter and Becket).
Spencer Tracy played Father Flanagan (Boys Town and Men of Boys Town)
Henry Stanley (Stanley and Livingstone)
Major Robert Rogers (Northwest Passage)
Thomas Edison (Edison, the Man)
Lt Colonel Jimmy Doolittle (30 seconds over Tokyo)
Captain Christopher Jones (Plymouth Adventure)
Clarence Earl Gideon in Gideon’s TrumpetC
General Douglas Macarthur in Collision Course: Truman vs. Macarthur
Clarence Darrow in Clarence Darrow
Emmett Kelley in The Clown
MOVIES:
Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln
Admiral Chester Nimitz in Midway and In Harm’s Way
Assistant Attorney General John Bottomly in The Boston Strangler
General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. in The Longest Day
Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine
Thomas Watson in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
Frank James in Jesse James and The Return of Frank James
I couldn’t wrap my head around this one until I went and looked this performance up. But, indeed, Hopkins did look the part in that movie after all, and he won an Emmy for his performance.
I don’t know if he really did look the part. In that picture, he looks like a guy dressed up as Hitler. Hitler’s appearance is so iconic that anyone can vaguely “look like him” by wearing his distinctive parted hair, his mustache, and a Nazi uniform. But the real man had such an intensely sinister and unique face, I think it’s pretty damn hard to truly pull it off.
John Wayne has a surprising number of credits playing real people. (Surprising because he always seemed to be playing John Wayne.)
John Chisum
David Crockett
Townsend Harris
Genghis Khan
Lt Rusty Ryan (debatable - the character is based on the real Lt Robert Kelly)
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort
Frank “Spig” Wead
Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK
Ludwig van Beethoven in Immortal Beloved
Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy
Pontius Pilate in the TV movie Jesus
Milton Glenn in Murder in the First
Albert Milo in Basquiat (though the character wasn’t real, but was actually a portrayal of Julian Schnabel
You can make an argument about Dracula (or Vlad Tepes).
Hmm. Thanks- didn’t know that. (I wonder if Sheen ever starts hoping Blair will run over a nun while driving drunk or leave his wife for a 16 year old or something so that he’ll be big news again and Sheen can play him in the movie and get that vacation house he wants.)
Yeah, but you could give Jerry Seinfeld, Jackie Chan or Andy Griffith the moustache and sweep-to-the-left wig and they’d look like Hitler.
Where I was going wrong was imagining a 70-something present-day Hopkins playing Hitler :smack: You and Argent are definitely right about Hitler’s iconography.
