I’ve seen the “character portrayed by the most actors” question here before a few times, and it usually comes down to Lincoln or Jesus. So let’s throw them out, along with Moses, Washington, and the whole Lot. What fictional character, not from religion, has had the most actors portraying him or her? I will leave the question of whether a character from myth like Zeus counts as religious up for discussion.
Sherlock Holmes.
Ebeneezer Scrooge.
Hamlet is also up there, especially if you count stage actors.
bup beat me to Sherlock Holmes, so put me down for Tarzan. There have been a LOT of Tarzans
I would go with Dracula.
From this IMDB page listing all portrayals of Sherlock Holmes, I used some tools to extract 169 unique actors.
More research:
Dracula 337 (may be higher if they didn’t get all the variations of the name on this page)
Tarzan 75
Scrooge 143
Hamlet 223
If we count stage plays then Romeo & Juliet have got to be up there. Along with MacBeth.
How about Santa Claus? Particularly if you include all of the times that a character on a show wore a Santa suit. It’s not something that you can easily quantify, though, unlike the actors appearing as Sherlock Holmes.
James Bond? I’m sure I wouldn’t find them all, but IMDB lists 256 spoof appearances (a few actors might overlap) and there were 11 real ones.
I gotto go with this, if you include all the retail store Santas.
Santa is fictional?
Santa is non-religious?
Santa is a character?
Dracula makes sense. Aside from a million versions of the original story, he gets used as a one-off villain or spoof a lot. Much more so then Holmes or Scrooge, I’d say.
Robin Hood got 153 hits.