The real people who hated being portrayed on screen – and sued

Stephen Frears’s 2022 drama The Lost King, with a script co-written by Steve Coogan, had the noble intention of trying to right historic wrongs, in aiming to clear the sullied name of our most maligned monarch, Richard III. In the process, though, it has come under fire for plucking a different villain from among the living – a man who has taken such umbrage at his portrayal that he is suing Coogan and the filmmakers.

Richard Taylor is the former deputy registrar at the University of Leicester, whose lawyers claim he’s presented as “devious”, “weasel-like”, “dismissive”, “patronising” and “misogynistic”, absolutely all of which are true of the film character of Richard Taylor (Lee Ingleby), in his dealings with the plucky researcher played by Sally Hawkins.

Fun can be had guessing who might play you in the biopic of your life, but what if they throw you under a bus? It’s on this basis that Taylor, and many people before him, have resorted to legal action.

Such cases can be notoriously hard to resolve, because of the latitude given towards creative licence under both UK and US law. Orson Welles ignited a lifelong feud with the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst when he made Citizen Kane. However, because it didn’t purport to be an outright biopic, and every name had been changed, Hearst couldn’t sue. Instead, he set out to suppress the film by every means available.

Mark Zuckerberg, famously, was not a great fan of The Social Network, either. As a public figure, he would have had a tough job proving defamation against him, because under America’s First Amendment law, it’s necessary to show that “actual malice” was perpetrated. These free-speech protections mean that many defamation lawsuits against public figures are dropped even when it’s possible to prove that the facts are obviously wrong.

Sometimes, the filmmakers aren’t quite so lucky. Here are eight instances which actually went to court.

Irina Yusupova vs MGM (1933)

This case over the trashy, heavily-made-up pre-Code drama Rasputin and the Empress (1932) caused one heck of a stink. Ever after, Hollywood productions would cover their backs with some variation on the disclaimer that “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.”

Now, it wasn’t possible to libel “mad monk” Grigori Rasputin, no matter how hammily Lionel Barrymore played him, because he was dead. Alas, MGM had ignored the advice of a historical researcher that they were on shaky ground with other characters. They instead sacked this person, and insisted on including a rape scene for shock value.

The victim of the rape, “Princess Natasha” (Diana Wynyard), is married in the film to John Barrymore’s character, the assassin “Prince Paul Chegodieff”, whom everyone recognised as the Romanov aristocrat Felix Yusupov.

Because the latter’s real-life wife, Irina Yusupova, had never even met Rasputin, she and her husband were understandably offended by the notion that he had hypnotised and raped her. MGM had to pay Yusupova $25,000, remove the rape scene, and take the film out of circulation for decades. In its now-censored form, Wynyard’s character doesn’t make a lot of sense: she’s a Rasputin fangirl in the first half who just cowers away from him inexplicably in the second.

Olivia de Havilland vs FX for Feud: Bette and Joan (2017)

Neither Bette Davis nor Joan Crawford lived to see themselves caricatured in this cat-fighty eight-part Ryan Murphy show, starring Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, about their infamous animosity on the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

One surviving old-timer was not at all amused, though. One year past her 100th birthday, Olivia de Havilland took the FX Network and Murphy to court, incensed at seeing herself played by Catherine Zeta-Jones as a gossipy hypocrite, sniping on the sidelines at fellow Hollywood royalty.

Few expected de Havilland to win her suit because of the First Amendment protections cited above, but she pushed through with it undaunted, in a one-woman crusade against “intentional lies” and the sullying of her carefully tended reputation.

At every knock-back, she carried on appealing, including to the Supreme Court. The one in California had already ruled that her portrayal was “not highly offensive to a reasonable person as a matter of law” and that she didn’t have the right to “control, dictate, approve, disapprove, or veto the creator’s portrayal of actual people.” Olivia de Havilland died in 2020, aged 104.

Nona Gaprindashvili vs The Queen’s Gambit (2020)

Nona Gaprindashvili is the world’s first-ever female chess Grandmaster, awarded the title in 1978. According to the final episode of The Queen’s Gambit, however, she “has never faced men”, a claim Gaprindashvili argued was false, sexist and belittling, since she’d already played against at least 59 male competitors by 1968, when the series’ climax happens. She sought $5m in damages, and Netflix agreed to settle out of court in 2022.

Andrew Greene vs The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Several suits have plagued The Wolf of Wall Street, including a $300m fraud claim initiated in 2020 by Jordan Belfort, the very man at the centre of it. In fact, this has nothing to do with the accuracy of his depiction, but relates to the film being funded, it has been alleged, by ill-gotten gains from a Malaysian money-laundering scheme.

However, a banker called Andrew Greene claimed that the character Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff (PJ Byrne) was clearly based on him, specifically because of the hairpiece he wears. He took offence at being painted as a “criminal, drug user, degenerate, depraved and devoid of any morals or ethics”, and launched a $50m libel suit in 2014. A federal appeals court threw out the last re-filing of his suit in 2020, ruling that the character was a composite, and that Greene had therefore not been maliciously defamed.

Samantha Barbash vs Hustlers (2019)

Barbash was the real-life inspiration for Jennifer Lopez’s character Ramona Vega, the veteran stripper who coaches a posse of exotic dancers to swindle thousands out of their Wall Street clients. Barbash, who pled guilty to conspiracy, assault, and grand larceny in 2017, wasn’t impressed with Hustlers, and said the character of Vega was nothing like her; she also disputed the film’s suggestion that she came up with the recipe for the MDMA/ketamine cocktail used to drug the male targets. Alas, because she published her own memoir to correct the film’s inaccuracies, and thanks to numerous media appearances, she was treated by the court as a public figure, and her $40 million suit for exploitation of her image and defamation was rejected.

Linda Fairstein vs Netflix for When They See Us (2019)

Linda Fairstein was the Manhattan prosecutor in the Central Park Five case, which saw the wrongful conviction of five men for the 1989 rape of Trisha Meili overturned in 2014, resulting in a $41m settlement. Ava DuVernay’s four-part Netflix series presented Fairstein, played by Felicity Huffman, as the chief villain, a personification of everything wrong with America’s criminal justice system.

As soon as the series came out in 2019, #CancelLindaFairstein started trending on Twitter, triggering a boycott of her crime novels. She was dropped by her publisher and forced to resign from several boards.

It was ruled in September 2023 that Fairstein’s ongoing case for defamation against Netflix can move ahead, suggesting plausible evidence of malice. A federal judge has ruled that the makers of the show “reverse-engineered plot points to attribute actions, responsibilities and viewpoints to Fairstein that were not hers and are unsupported in defendants’ substantial body of research materials.” Script notes from Netflix employees have also been found proposing to “[heighten] the most negative aspects of the Fairstein character to build dramatic tension and advance storytelling goals.”

Jerry Heller vs Straight Outta Compton (2015)

Heller was the manager of NWA, played in their 2015 biopic by a grasping Paul Giamatti. He filed a $110m suit against Universal that year, arguing that he’d never given permission for his name or likeness to be used, that he was portrayed in a false light, and that the script plundered details from his memoirs without consent.

The film made Heller the key architect of the group breaking up, by using him as the source of conflict between Ice Cube, Eazy-E and Dr Dre, and also presenting him as a sleazy operator who took advantage of them – all of which Heller denied was true. The majority of his defamation claims were dismissed, though. After Heller died in 2016, his estate took over the final complaint about copyright infringement, but this was thrown out in 2018 as insufficiently substantiated.

Mark Schiller vs Pain and Gain (2013)

Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain (2013) was loudly trumpeted as a true story, despite being lavishly fictionalised and grimly played for laughs. None came from Mark Schiller, the real-life kidnapping victim who was tortured by a trio of ’roid-fulled gym bunnies (as played by Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie and Dwayne Johnson).

Schiller was renamed in the film as one Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) – a clue, perhaps, that Paramount were already a little queasy about sketching him as a “criminal prick” (in the words of Wahlberg’s character) who deserves all the punishment he gets. A Miami court saw merit in the businessman’s case, including his lawyer’s argument that hardly any viewers bother to watch the end credits all the way to the classic disclaimer. Paramount paid an unspecified sum to settle the case in 2016.