Historical Figures That Hollywood Got Wrong!

1.Marie Antoinette

Film: Marie Antoinette (2006)

What Hollywood Did: Portray Marie-Antoinette as a spoiled and oblivious child.

Why It's Wrong: First off, this Sofia Coppola film starring Kirsten Dunst is as beautiful as it is ridiculous, and manages to get a lot right historically despite throwing around Chuck Taylors and Adam Ant songs. However, it totally misrepresents Marie Antionette. While she's become a symbol of the decadence of the aristocracy of ye olde France, the real Marie Antoinette was totally aware of the world of cutthroat politics she lived in and had her own political interests. She wasn't just a shop-a-holic with a sweet tooth.

2.Commodus

Film: Gladiator (2000)

What Hollywood Did: Portrayed Commodus as a father-killing super-creep.

Why It's Wrong: While Commodus was a terrible emperor who was completely insane by the end of his reign, he never killed his dad. In fact, he served as joint emperor with his father Marcus Aurelius for three years as a teen leading up to Aurelius's death. While people have been criticizing the reign of Commodus for thousands of years, and Joaquin Phoenix's performance is nightmare-worthy, Commodus never Macbeth-ed his dad IRL.

3.Isabella of France

Film: Braveheart (1995)

What Hollywood Did: Jerry Springer-ed it up.  

Why It's Wrong: Not only did William Wallace and Isabella of France never meet in real life, but the film reduced a pretty historically cunning and intelligent royal lady to a romantic object. During the historical events Mel Gibson's Braveheart was inspired by, Isabella was a child living happily in France. She didn't even get married for the first time until long after her fake movie side piece was dead. She definitely never cheated on her husband and had a baby by William Wallace.

4.Pocahontas

Film: Pocahontas (1995)

What Hollywood Did: Portrayed her as a fully grown model-looking woman that was in love with the also super-hot John Smith.  

Why It's Wrong: John Smith was almost thirty when he met Pocahontas IRL, and Pocahontas was only ten, meaning that if there was any "wind painting epic romance" going down it would not exactly be Disney film material. In real life, teenage Pocahontas was kidnapped by the English and forced to marry John Rolfe, who kept her as a curiosity in his house in Middlesex until she died of tuberculosis in her early twenties. 

5.Leonidas I

Film: 300 (2007)

What Hollywood Did: Portrayed King Leonidas and the Spartans as "good guys." 

Why It's Wrong: First off, the Spartans teamed up with thousands of troops from Athens to fight the Persians, so director and writer Zack Snyder's portrayal of the Battle of Thermopylae as strictly Spartans vs. Persians is wrong. Also, portraying the Persians as barbarians and the Spartans as good guys is not only pretty racist but also wrong. You know the part where Leonidas earns his coming-of-age stripes by killing a wolf alone in the woods? The IRL Spartan coming-of-age test was to sneak out of your house and murder a slave without getting caught. How's that for barbarism?

6.William Shakespeare

Film: Shakespeare in Love (1998)

What Hollywood Did: Claimed Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was inspired by a whirlwind romance of his own. 

Why It's Wrong: Despite having one of the biggest Oscar-bait payoffs in Tinseltown (it won seven Academy Awards), the main plot point of John Madden's film is wrong. It claims that Romeo and Juliet was inspired by Shakespeare's whirlwind romance with a crossdressing actress who never actually existed. In reality, Romeo and Juliet was adapted from other sources, like most of Shakespeare's work.

7.Elizabeth I of England

Film: Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

What Hollywood Did: Put Elizabeth I on the battlefield. 

Why It's Wrong: This is pretty much universally considered to be a bad movie. While some people appreciate director Shekhar Kapur's intricate, over-the-top Elizabethan Lady Gaga aesthetic, no one would really put this failed sequel in their top 10. It's riddled with historical inaccuracies, including putting Elizabeth in a suit of armor and having her ride out to give a butchered version of one of her most famous speeches to soldiers. Yikes. 

8.Franklin D. Roosevelt

Film: Pearl Harbor (2001)

What Hollywood Did: Had Roosevelt stand up even though he was disabled by polio.  

Why It's Wrong: You probably shouldn't expect much from a film that turned Pearl Harbor into a sappy boring love triangle, but this is still really stupid. After contracting polio at age 39, FDR spent most of the rest of his life wheelchair-bound, only able to walk short distances with canes and help according to some sources. The fact that this movie depicts him standing on his own is ridiculous. Thanks, Michael Bay.

9.Sacagawea

Film: The Far Horizons (1955)

What Hollywood Did: Made Sacagawea and William Clark bang. 

Why It's Wrong: Forcing a romantic subplot into your historical film by having two people that never met or were never together be an item usually does not make a great movie, and it definitely didn't do Rudolph Maté's The Far Horizons any favors. In real life, Sacagawea is famous for being the only woman on Lewis and Clark's expedition through the American West. In the movie, they decided that Clark and Sacagawea should fall in love while facing off against the film's villain, who was Sacagawea's real life non-villainous husband.

10.Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Film: Amadeus (1984)

What Hollywood Did: Took two dudes that probably had no beef with each other and made one destroy the other.

Why It's Wrong: There's a lot of gaps in what we know about the life of Mozart, and we know even less about his (according to Miloš Forman's film) sworn enemy Salieri. While in the film Mozart is portrayed as a man-child and tragic bachelor that blows all his money partying, he was actually a father of eight and hired Salieri to tutor one of his sons. Mozart died a mysterious death, but there's no proof that Salieri had anything to do with it. 

11. Lyndon B. Johnson

Film: JFK (1991)

What Hollywood Did: Hinted that Lyndon B Johnson staged a coup and had Kennedy assassinated in order to become President. 

Why It's Wrong: Holy House of Cards, Batman! While there are a whole lot of conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and two-thirds of Americans believe that something shady went down, there is zero proof that what this movie suggests ever happened. This movie caught heat for presenting a lot of untrue garbage in a documentary format.

12.Cleopatra

Film: Cleopatra (1963)

What Hollywood Did: Portray Cleopatra as an incredible beauty. 

Why It's Wrong: Different historical sources say different things about Cleopatra's looks, and many of those are from after her death, so they can't actually be trusted. Some report that she was beautiful, while others claim that she was average looking but so brilliant and charming that men tripped over themselves to be with her. To be honest, Cleopatra may have looked like Elizabeth Taylor, or she may have looked like Deadpool under his costume. There are some surviving likenesses of her, but none of them look the same. No one really knows for sure what she looked like.  

13.Alexander the Great

Film: Alexander (2004)

What Hollywood Did: Nothing right. Not one thing right.

Why It's Wrong: Alexander the Great is a controversial and important figure in world history, and Oliver Stone managed to offend everyone on Earth with his three-hour, $150 million flop. Some people were mad that the film hinted that Alexander may have been bisexual, while other people were mad that it didn't make him openly queer as history seems to imply. This film also portrayed Greeks and Persians incorrectly, making even more people mad.

14.George VI

Film: The King's Speech (2010)

What Hollywood Did: Blew that speech impediment waaaay out of proportion. 

Why It's Wrong: In Tom Hooper's film, Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI) can hardly say a full sentence without stuttering. This was not the case in reality. While Prince Albert did stutter, recordings of him show that it was relatively minor, and would disappear almost entirely when he concentrated. In the late '20s, he gave a speech to the Australian Parliament without stuttering, but the movie depicts him stuttering uncontrollably until the start of World War II. I'm pretty sure turning a minor tick into a debilitating struggle for dramatic effect falls into the realm of "not cool."