Famous Faces, Look-Alike Stars: The Biopic Dilemma

Everyone knows what Lawrence of Arabia looks like. He looks like Peter O'Toole. Just as Cleopatra looks like Elizabeth Taylor, and the King of Siam looks like Yul Brynner.

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A British military expert on Arab customs, T.E. Lawrence (above) often wore traditional Bedouin robes. Peter O'Toole's lean features made him a good pick to play Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. But one discrepancy was noticeable: O'Toole (below) stood 6 feet 3 inches tall, while Lawrence topped out at 5 feet 6 inches.

Hulton Archive/Getty

A British military expert on Arab customs, T.E. Lawrence (above) often wore traditional Bedouin robes. Peter O'Toole's lean features made him a good pick to play Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. But one discrepancy was noticeable: O'Toole (below) stood 6 feet 3 inches tall, while Lawrence topped out at 5 feet 6 inches.

Enlarge Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures

Any actual resemblance there, of course, is strictly irrelevant. So when the producers of Amelia boast that their star looks so much like Amelia Earhart that they were able to use 1930s newsreel footage at one point rather than shooting a new scene, you think, "Well, cool, but ... so?" It's lucky casting, certainly. But since when are filmmakers sticklers for authenticity?

On TV's The Tudors, for instance, even this season's aging Henry VIII — we're well beyond the Anne Boleyn years now — isn't the fat, goitered, thin-lipped king we know from his mature portraits. He's the pouty, still-athletic Jonathan Rhys Meyers with a crew cut — easier on the eyes, presumably, as he's bedding those six wives.

Or consider Julia Child. In this summer's Julie and Julia, the hair was right, and 5-foot-6 star Meryl Streep was wearing platform heels to approximate the physical presence of the 6-foot-2 chef. But Streep didn't opt for fleshy prosthetics on cheek and chin. Instead, she nailed the bubbly, plummy voice.

Streep had an advantage: Director Nora Ephron didn't make her compete visually with a shot of the real Julia Child. But films about other famous figures have lately taken to actively bragging about how true to life they are. Audiences sat transfixed through the end credits of the movie Milk last year, as photos of the real people who had worked with gay activist Harvey Milk were matched with the actors who played them. It was as though the filmmakers had found virtual twins, some 30 years after the tragic events portrayed in the film.

A similar impulse seems to have driven the makers of a new soccer-rivalry movie, The Damned United. In this country, we don't know feuding coaches Brian Clough and Don Revie, but in Britain, they're downright legendary. And again, they've nearly been twinned.

At one point in the film, Michael Sheen's Clough and Colm Meaney's Revie argue in a TV studio about how their approaches to coaching the Leeds United team clashed. And everything about the shot — the setup of the chairs, their rhetorical rhythms, their postures — seems designed to precisely evoke a famous confrontation between the real coaches in 1974.

And if that's pretty close, it can't compete with a practically genetic sort of closeness. In the rap biography Notorious earlier this year, the late hip-hop artist Biggie Smalls was so precisely captured by actor Jamal Woolard that Smalls' own son was cast to play the rap star in childhood flashbacks.

It's worth noting that dramatic effectiveness doesn't depend on visual accuracy, and in fact, may be undercut by it. If you're lucky enough to get handsome Johnny Depp for your gangster movie, and then you load him down with prosthetics to make him look like craggy John Dillinger, the audience is going to spend the whole movie cursing you and thinking about makeup.

On the other hand, when you're handed not just a look-alike but a look-a-whole-lot-alike, as with Hilary Swank in Amelia, why not take advantage?

Just don't expect that happy accident to do too much of the dramatic work. As your parents no doubt told you, looks aren't everything — and as anything more than a glance at the film Amelia will tell you, looks'll do nothing at all to brighten a dull script.