Gwyneth Paltrow's character, Viola de Lesseps, never existed, and Shakespeare in Love invents an entire romance to explain how Romeo and Juliet got written. Joseph Fiennes plays Shakespeare as broke and blocked in 1593, which fits what little record survives of his finances around that time. Tom Stoppard co-wrote the script, and it won seven Oscars including Best Picture in 1999. None of the love story is real, but the theater chaos backstage gets the details right. | © Miramax
Elle Fanning's Catherine spends most of The Great cheerfully murdering historical accuracy, and the show even labels itself "an occasionally true story" in the opening credits. Catherine actually took power in 1762 through a coup against her husband Peter III, who died shortly after under murky circumstances. Peter is played here as a man-child obsessed with taxidermy, which has no basis in the record. Tony McNamara wrote it that way on purpose, since he'd already done the same thing to Queen Anne in The Favourite. | © Hulu
Christian Bale's Moses fights in battles that show up nowhere in Exodus: Gods and Kings, and the film gives him a sword-fighting backstory as an Egyptian general. Ridley Scott built the plague and Red Sea sequences around modern disaster movie logic rather than the biblical text. There's no historical or archaeological record confirming Moses existed at all, let alone led an army. The film treats him like a general because Scott wanted a war movie hiding inside a religious one. | © 20th Century Fox
Abraham Lincoln never fought supernatural creatures, but the 2012 adaptation of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter builds its entire premise on that conceit. The film integrates real historical milestones, including the 1860 presidential election, into its horror storyline. Seth Grahame-Smith wrote the 2010 source novel as an alternate history mixing Lincoln's biography with horror tropes. The plot attributes the death of Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, to a vampire attack rather than milk sickness. | © 20th Century Fox
Artemisia Gentileschi was raped by the painter Agostino Tassi in 1611, and the 1998 film Artemisia turns that assault into a consensual love affair instead. The real trial transcripts survive, and they document Tassi's conviction along with details of torture used to verify Artemisia's testimony. She went on to become one of the only women admitted to Florence's Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in 1616. The film softens the crime that actually shaped her most famous paintings. | © Miramax
George C. Scott studied hours of newsreel footage before shooting Patton, trying to match the general's odd, high-pitched voice. The real Patton slapped two soldiers he accused of cowardice in 1943, an incident the film keeps close to the record. What gets invented is the tone, since Patton in life was far more openly religious and superstitious than the screenplay allows. He believed in reincarnation and said so often. | © 20th Century Fox
Marie Antoinette never once has its lead say "let them eat cake," because there's no real evidence she ever did. Kirsten Dunst plays her as a bored teenager dropped into Versailles at 14, which tracks with her actual age at marriage in 1770. The Converse sneakers visible in one shot are not a mistake, they're the point. History gets less screen time here than shoe shopping. | © Sony Pictures
Alan Turing never announced he'd cracked Enigma to a room of stunned officers, the way The Imitation Game stages it. Bletchley Park's work in 1941 was slow, collective, and deliberately unglamorous by design. Benedict Cumberbatch plays him as isolated and friendless, though Turing had real colleagues and a fiancée, Joan Clarke, based on an actual codebreaker. He was convicted of gross indecency in 1952, a fact the film gets right. | © The Weinstein Company
Gérard Depardieu portrays Christopher Columbus as an enlightened visionary in 1492: Conquest of Paradise, minimizing his brutal administration of Hispaniola. Columbus governed so violently that the Spanish Crown arrested him and returned him to Spain in chains in 1500. Directed by Ridley Scott and set to a score by Vangelis, the epic largely glosses over colonial atrocities and underperformed at the box office. | © Paramount Pictures
Braveheart gives William Wallace a face-paint aesthetic and a love affair with Princess Isabella of France, who was about nine years old and living in France when Wallace died in 1305. He never met her. Wallace also didn't wear a kilt, since Highland dress like that didn't exist yet in 13th century Scotland. Mel Gibson's film won five Oscars anyway, including Best Picture, fabricated timeline and all. | © Paramount Pictures
P. T. Barnum operated Scudder's American Museum before establishing his circus, making early profits by displaying Joice Heth, an enslaved Black woman he falsely claimed was 161 years old. The Greatest Showman replaces this exploitation with an uplifting story starring Hugh Jackman. While Barnum embraced the title "Prince of Humbugs," the word itself was established slang decades before his career began. | © 20th Century Fox
Hollywood loves a good biopic, but plenty of films reshaped real historical figures into something barely resembling the truth. Here are 15 historical figures Hollywood rewrote completely.
