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Famous People vs. the Actors Who Played Them
 495  6.5  6.8 Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen ( a gangster based in Los Angeles and part of the Jewish Mafia, and also had strong ties to the American Mafia from the 1930s through 1960s)
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364 6.8 6.9 Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcok (an English film director and producer.He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, billed as England's best director, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in 1939)
 Also Hellen Mirren as Alma Reville ( an English assistant director, screenwriter,editor and wife of Alfred Hitchcock)  propelas's rating:
763 7.7 7.9 Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez (an American CIA technical operations officer, now retired, who specialized in support of clandestine and covert CIA operations. He has written three memoirs about his CIA experiences.
Mendez was decorated, and is now widely known, for his on-the-scene management of the "Canadian caper" during the Iran hostage crisis, in which he exfiltrated six American diplomats from Iran in November 1979. Posing as a Canadian film crew, they were accompanied by Dennis Packer, a CBC cameraman. As part of their cover, the diplomats carried passports issued by the Canadian government to document them as Canadian citizens)  propelas's rating:
 
756 7.2 7.6 Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln (the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln successfully led his country through its greatest constitutional, military, and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization)
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612 6.4 6.6 Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover (the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories)
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1388 7.5 7.6 Ben Kingsley as George Melies ( a French illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès, a prolific innovator in the use of special effects, accidentally discovered the substitution stop trick in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour in his work)
  propelas's rating:
625 6.9 7 Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe (an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol,starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s)
 Also Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier (an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century)  propelas's rating:
487 6.3 6.3 Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher (a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990. During her time as prime minister, Thatcher's strict conservative policies, hard line against trade unions and tough rhetoric in opposition to the Soviet Union earned her the nickname the "Iron Lady")
 suggested by Gaby propelas's rating:
 
800 7.1 7.6 Brad Pitt as Billy Beane (a former Major League Baseball player and the current general manager and minority owner of the Oakland Athletics)
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810 6.4 6.5 Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud (an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis.Freud went on to develop theories about the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and established the field of verbal psychotherapy by creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst)
 Also Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung (a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration.Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and symbolization. While he was a fully involved and practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts)  
590 6.7 6.5 Audrey Tautou as Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel ( a pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist thought, menswear-inspired fashions, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion. She was the founder of one of the most famous fashion brands, Chanel)
 suggested by MihaM 
272 6.5 6.8 Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame (a former United States CIA Operations Officer and the author of a memoir detailing her career and the events leading up to her resignation from the CIA)
 Also: Sean Penn as Joe Wilson (a former United States diplomat best known for his 2002 trip to Niger to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium; his New York Times op-ed piece, "What I Didn't Find in Africa";[1] and the subsequent "outing" of his wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent)  propelas's rating:
2121 7.9 8.1 Colin Firth as King George VI ( King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth from 11 December 1936 until his death. He was the last Emperor of India, and the first Head of the Commonwealth)
 Also Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue ( an Australian speech therapist and stage actor who successfully treated, among others, King George VI, who had a pronounced stammer)  suggested by Rah propelas's rating:
119 7.1 6.7 Eric Elmosnino as Serge Gainsbourg (a French singer-songwriter,actor and director.Gainsbourg's extremely varied musical style and individuality make him difficult to categorize.His legacy has been firmly established,and he is often regarded as one of the world's most influential popular musicians)
 
1449 7.2 7.6 Brad Pitt as Jesse James (an American outlaw, gang leader, bank robber, train robber, and murderer from the state of Missouri and the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang. Already a celebrity when he was alive, he became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death)
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2659 7.4 7.9 Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg (an American software developer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president. It was co-founded as a private company in 2004 by Zuckerberg and classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while they were students at Harvard University.In 2010, Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year.
 suggested by Zora propelas's rating:
841 7.4 7.6 Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf [a French singer and cultural icon who became universally regarded as France's greatest popular singer.Her singing reflected her life, with her specialty being ballads. Among her songs are "La Vie en rose" (1946), "Non, je ne regrette rien" (1960), "Hymne à l'amour" (1949), "Milord" (1959), "La Foule" (1957), "l'Accordéoniste" (1955), and "Padam... Padam..." (1951)]
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1108 7.1 7.6 David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow (an American broadcast journalist. He first came to prominence with a series of radio news broadcasts during World War II, which were followed by millions of listeners in the United States and Canada.A pioneer of television news broadcasting, Murrow produced a series of TV news reports that helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
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186 5.4 5.7 Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart (a noted American aviation pioneer and author.Earhart was the first woman to receive the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross,[3] awarded for becoming the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.She set many other records,wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots)
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3211 8.2 8.5 Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman ( a Polish-Jewish pianist, composer, and memoirist who he survived from the Holocaust)
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1695 7.5 7.7 James Franco as Aron Rolstin (an American mountain climber and public speaker. He became widely known in May 2003 when, while canyoneering in Utah, he was forced by an accident to amputate his right arm with a dull knife in order to free himself from a boulder.)
 suggested by Gaby propelas's rating:
1011 6.8 7 Meryl Streep as Julia Child ( American chef,author, and television personality)
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215 7.6 7.2 Toni Servillo as Giulio Andreotti (an Italian politician of the now dissolved centrist Christian Democracy party. He served as the 42nd Prime Minister of Italy from 1972 to 1973, from 1976 to 1979 and from 1989 to 1992. He also served as Minister of the Interior (1954 and 1978), Defense Minister (1959–1966 and 1974) and Foreign Minister (1983–1989) and he has been a senator for life since 1991.Andreotti was investigated for his role in the 1979 murder of Mino Pecorelli, a journalist who had published allegations that Andreotti had links with the Mafia and with the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. A court acquitted him in 1999 after a trial that lasted three years, but he was convicted on appeal in November 2002 and sentenced to twenty-four years' imprisonment. The eighty-three-year-old Andreotti was immediately released pending an appeal. On October 30, 2003 an appeal court overturned the conviction and acquitted Andreotti of the original murder charge. That same year, the court of Palermo acquitted him of ties to the Mafia, but only on grounds of expiry of statutory terms. The court established that Andreotti had indeed had strong ties to the Mafia until 1980, and had used them to further his political career to such an extent as to be considered part of the Mafia itself.)
  propelas's rating:
2295 7.6 8 Johnny Depp as Ed Wood (an American screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author, and editor, who often performed many of these functions simultaneously. In the 1950s, Wood made a number of cheap genre films, now enjoyed for their technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, large amounts of ill-fitting stock footage, idiosyncratic dialogue, eccentric casts and outlandish plot elements, although his flair for showmanship gave his projects at least a modicum of critical success)
  suggested by WreckMe666 propelas's rating:
 
305 6.9 7 Ryan Phillippe as Eric O'Neill (a former American FBI operative. He worked as an Investigative Specialist with the Special Surveillance Group (SSG) and played a major role in the arrest and life imprisonment conviction of FBI agent Robert Hanssen for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia)
 Also Chris Cooper as Robert Hanssen (a former American FBI agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001)  propelas's rating:
1686 7.4 7.8 Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins (a phone company supervisor whose nine year old son Walter disappeared from their home in Los Angeles, California on March 10, 1928)
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596 7.1 7.4 Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler (a United States Navy Naval aviator during the Vietnam War. He was one of the two survivors,out of seven, to escape from a Pathet Lao prison camp in Laos. He was rescued after 23 days on the run,and was the first captured U.S. airman to escape after six months of torture and imprisonment)
  propelas's rating:
1320 7.4 7.7 Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin (a military leader and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King's African Rifles in 1946. Eventually he held the rank of Major General in the post-colonial Ugandan Army and became its Commander before seizing power in the military coup of January 1971, deposing Milton Obote. He later promoted himself to Field Marshal while he was the head of state.
Amin's rule was characterized by gross human rights abuse, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is estimated by international observers and human rights groups to range from 100,000 to 500,000)  propelas's rating:
9 5.8 6.2 Denis Podalydès as Nicolas Sarkozy (the 23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. He assumed the office on 16 May 2007 after defeating the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal 10 days earlier)
  
309 6.6 7 Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock (an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life)
 Suggested by iroak 
503 7.5 8 George C.Scott as General George S. Patton Jr. (a United States Army officer best known for his leadership while commanding corps and armies as a general during World War II.)
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954 7.8 8 Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Do (a French journalist, author and editor of the French fashion magazine ELLE)
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1694 7.4 7.8 Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas ( former U.S. heroin dealer and organized crime boss who operated in Harlem during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was particularly known for cutting out middlemen in the drug trade and buying heroin directly from his source in the Golden Triangle)
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2210 6.7 7.2 Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich (an American legal clerk and environmental activist who, despite the lack of a formal law school education, or any legal education, was instrumental in constructing a case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) of California in 1993)
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2507 6.9 7.5 Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell (a former NASA astronaut and a retired captain in the United States Navy, most famous as the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, which suffered a critical failure en route to the Moon but was brought back safely to Earth by the efforts of the crew and mission control)
 Also Bill Paxton as Fred Haise (an engineer and former NASA astronaut. He is one of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon. Having flown on Apollo 13, Haise was to be the sixth human to walk on the Moon, but the mission did not land due to a failure aboard the spacecraft)  and Kevin Bacon as Jack Swigert (a NASA astronaut.Before joining NASA, Swigert was a test pilot. After leaving NASA, he was elected to the US Congress, but died before being sworn in)  propelas's rating:
3173 8.3 8.8 Ray Liotta as Henry Hill ( a former American mobster, Lucchese crime family associate, and FBI informant.)
 suggested by WreckMe666 propelas's rating:
1162 6.9 6.9 Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan (an American singer-songwriter, poet, and painter. He has been a major figure in music for five decades.Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler, and an apparently reluctant figurehead, of social unrest.Though he is well-known for revolutionizing perceptions of the limits of popular music in 1965 with the six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone," a number of his earlier songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. His early lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social and philosophical, as well as literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture)
 propelas's rating:
1561 7.6 8.2 Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina (a Rwandan humanitarian who has been internationally honored for saving 1,268 refugees during the Rwandan Genocide. He was the assistant manager of the Sabena Hôtel des Mille Collines before he became the manager of the Hôtel des Diplomates, both in Kigali, Rwanda. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Rusesabagina used his influence and connections as temporary manager of the 'Mille Collines' to shelter 1,268 Tutsis and moderate Hutus from being slaughtered by the Interahamwe militia)
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222 7 6.9 AnnaSophia Robb as Bethany Hamilton (an American professional surfer. She is known for surviving a shark attack in which she lost her left arm, and for overcoming the serious and debilitating injury to ultimately return to professional surfing.)
 
97 7 7.1 Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bulow(a British socialite of German and Danish ancestry.He was accused of the attempted murder of his wife Sunny von Bülow (born Martha Sharp Crawford von Bülow, 1931–2008) by administering an insulin overdose in 1980 which left her in a persistent vegetative state for the rest of her life, but his conviction in the first trial was reversed and he was found not guilty in both his retrials)
 Suggested by SFG¿mystic 
1090 8 8.4 Peter O'Toole as T.E. Lawrence ( a British Army officer renowned especially for his liaison role during the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule of 1916–18. The extraordinary breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia)
 suggested by C!pH3r propelas's rating:
776 6.6 6.5 Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett (an American rock guitarist,singer,songwriter,producer and actress)
 
576 7.3 7.2 Emily Blunt as Queen Victoria (the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India)
  suggested by MihaM 
537 6.4 6.9 Renee Zellweger as Beatrix Potter (an English author, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist best known for her imaginative children’s books featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit which celebrated the British landscape and country life)
  suggested by MihaM propelas's rating:
225 6.5 6.6 Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin (an English naturalist.[I] He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection)
  
808 6.9 6.9 Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen (an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics)
  suggested by MihaM propelas's rating:
529 7.2 7.4 Hilary Swank as Erin Gruwell (an American teacher known for her unorthodox teaching method, which led to the publication of The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them (1999))
 suggested by MihaM propelas's rating:
4989 7.3 7.9 Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jr (an American security consultant known for his history as a former confidence trickster, check forger, impostor, and escape artist. He became notorious in the 1960s for passing $2.5 million worth of meticulously forged checks across 26 countries over the course of five years, beginning when he was 16 years old.
In the process, he claimed to have assumed no fewer than eight separate identities, impersonating an airline pilot, a doctor, a Bureau of Prisons agent, and a lawyer. He escaped from police custody twice (once from a taxiing airliner and once from a U.S. federal penitentiary), before he was 21 years old.)  propelas's rating:
248 7.4 7.3 Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Baader and
Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof (leaders of the German left-wing militant organization Red Army Faction, also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.)   propelas's rating:
1829 7.5 7.9 Julie Andrews as Marie Von Trapp ( the stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers)
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People who voted for this also voted for
Theres another Darwin in "The Fall", also Jesus would quite fit in here :D
Awesome list!
BRAVO!!!!:)
And Paul Bettany really looks like young Darwin! 0_0
Ben Kingsley was so amazing as Gandhi
I felt like I was watching the real thing.
How about Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
as Bonnie & Clyde?
Paul Bettany is amazing as Darwin!
My suggestion is James Franco as Aaron Ralston in "127 hours"
Might I suggest including the other stages of Bob Dylan portrayed in I'm Not There? Also:
Denzel Washington as Malcolm X
David Bowie as Nikola Tesla (The Prestige)
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs (Almost Famous)
Hayden Christensen as Stephen Glass (Shattered Glass)
Robert De Niro as Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987)
Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness in The Untouchables (1987)
Johnny Depp as Joseph D. Pistone a.k.a Donnie Brasco in Donnie Brasco (1997)
It's not released yet but...
Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.
:)
will smith as Chris gardner...
great list.
This is going to be one of the top voted list :)
Jennifer Lopez playing Selena
Laurence Fishbourne playing Ike Turner
GREAT LIST!!!!! :):):)
Thanks for adding my previous suggestion! :)
http://www.listal.com/list/actors-won-oscars-playing-real
My sugestions: Isabelle Adjani as Camille Claudel, Isabelle Adjani as Adèle Hugo, Gérard Depardieu as Auguste Rodin, Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan, Patty Duke as Helen Keller, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Fred Astaire as Vernon Castle, Ginger Rogers as Irene Castle, Greer Garson as Marie Curie, Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen (...)