Famous Writers Portrayed Onscreen

Rupert Everett stars in his own directorial debut in a role he was born to play (and in fact had before, having portrayed Wilde onstage). 'The Happy Prince' dramatizes not the witty playwright's youth, however, but his heartbreaking final days, spent living in exile after having been imprisoned for gross indecency.

Writer-director Terence Davies lends his poetic approach to a subject deserving of it. Backed by co-stars Jennifer Ehle and Duncan Duff playing Dickinson’s sister and brother, Cynthia Nixon stars as the reclusive 19th-century poet who could not stop for Death.

Colin Firth plays Maxwell Perkins, editor to such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. 'Genius' focuses on the literary legend's personal and professional relationship with Thomas Wolfe, played by Jude Law, and how Perkins got the exceedingly verbose writer to cut his books down to a readable length.

Jason Segel gives a breathtaking performance as David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s Sundance hit, which portrays the last few days of Wallace’s 'Infinite Jest' book tour in 1996, when Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) tagged along to profile the famously reclusive writer.

John Hurt gives a delightful performance in a supporting role as the Elizabethan playwright, living in present-day Morocco as one of the glamorous undead, in Jim Jarmusch’s romantic and stylish vampire movie. (And he would like you to know, for the record, that Marlowe apparently did write the works of Shakespeare.)

Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut illuminates the famous affair between the brilliant Victorian serial writer, played by Fiennes, and the much-younger Ellen Ternan (Felicity Jones), who many scholars believe provided the inspiration for some of Dickens’ beautiful and headstrong heroines, including 'Great Expectations'' Estella.

Daniel Radcliffe, Jack Huston and Ben Foster play Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, respectively, in John Krokidas' directorial debut, which chronicles the first meetings of these members of the Beat Generation in the 1940s, and the violent crime in which they were all implicated.

James Franco stars as Ginsberg in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s biopic 'Howl,' which takes a more experimental approach and a later timeframe than 'Kill Your Darlings,' focusing not on the Beat beginnings but rather the publication and ensuing obscenity trial of Ginsberg’s celebrated poem 'Howl' in the mid-1950s.

James McTeigue’s thriller imagines the poet and author hunting down a serial killer whose murders are all inspired by Poe’s spine-tingling body of work. John Cusack stars as the writer in the last few days of his life, and the film culminates in Poe’s truly mysterious death, for which it provides a new explanation.

When an American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) visits Paris with his fiancée in Woody Allen’s imaginative comedy, he happens upon a strange phenomenon: every night, at the stroke of midnight, he can be transported Paris in the 1920s, where he hangs with Ernest Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, among other creative luminaries.

The Romantic poet got a suitably heartbreaking treatment in Jane Campion’s lush biopic, starring Ben Whishaw as the sensitive, tuberculosis-stricken poet and Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne, the girl he loved and who inspired much of Keats’ best work—including, of course, “Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art.”

Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren star as the great Russian novelist and his wife, Sofya, in Michael Hoffman’s biopic. In the last few months of Tolstoy’s life, the leader of a group of Tolstoyan disciples (Paul Giamatti) and Sofya fought over the rights to Tolstoy’s works after his death, out of desire to protect his belief system and his children’s inheritance, respectively.

Anne Hathaway stars as the beloved novelist in Julian Jarrold’s semi-fictionalized account of a period in her young life. Austen famously never married, but 'Becoming Jane' infers a romance between her and Thomas Lefroy (James McAvoy), a man she was acquainted with, and portrays their relationship in very much the same vein as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, suggesting that it provided the inspiration for 'Pride and Prejudice.'

Renée Zellweger stars in Chris Noonan’s family film about the children’s story author and illustrator. The film portrays Potter’s romance with her editor Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), and animates her famous 'Peter Rabbit' illustrations in her first-person perspective.

Philip Seymour Hoffman won his only Oscar for starring as the enigmatic 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' author in Bennett Miller’s 2005 biopic, which focused on Capote's experience researching and writing his true-crime classic 'In Cold Blood.'

Douglas McGrath’s 'Infamous' had the bad luck of coming out just a year after 'Capote,' and many critics believed that the comparison did the second film no favors. 'Infamous,' which also depicts the process of 'In Cold Blood,' stars Toby Jones as Capote and features an all-star supporting cast, including Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee.

Johnny Depp stars as the Scottish playwright in director Marc Forster's tear-jerking, Oscar-winning drama (for Jan A. P. Kaczmarek’s score; the film was also nominated for Best Picture, and Depp for Best Actor), which depicts Barrie’s friendship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet), whose young sons inspired 'Peter Pan.' The film is based on an episode in Barrie’s life, but weaves in some fantasy elements as well, especially in the heartbreaking conclusion.

Gwyneth Paltrow stars as the troubled poet and novelist, and Daniel Craig co-stars as the poet Ted Hughes, whom Plath married in 1956. Paltrow’s mother, Blythe Danner, plays Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia Plath, as well. Christine Jeffs' film follows Plath and Hughes' romance from their meeting at Cambridge in the mid-1950s to Plath’s suicide in 1963.

Nicole Kidman won the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of the troubled writer in Stephen Daldry’s cine-literary triptych, based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. 'The Hours' jumps between Woolf as she writes 'Mrs. Dalloway' in the 1920s, a troubled housewife (Julianne Moore) reading the novel in the 1950s, and a woman in the early 2000s (Meryl Streep) whose life reflects that of Mrs. Dalloway herself.

Meryl Streep plays journalist Susan Orlean in Spike Jonze’s meta-adaptation of her nonfiction book 'The Orchid Thief,' which expands on an investigative piece she wrote for The New Yorker. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wrote himself (Nicolas Cage) and Orlean into the screenplay, dramatizing his own writer’s block in adapting the book alongside the events of the book itself, and fictionalizing Orlean’s relationship to the story she reported on.

Richard Eyre's film depicts the love story of Murdoch and her husband, fellow writer John Bayley, between two periods of their lives: first, as students at Oxford (played by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville), and then much later in life (Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), as Murdoch starts to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.

Miramax’s Oscar juggernaut took home seven statuettes in 1999, including Best Picture (over 'Saving Private Ryan,' in a major upset) and Best Actress for Gwyneth Paltrow. The film, directed by John Madden, drops winking references to Shakespeare's works throughout, and imagines a romance between Paltrow's character and the Bard himself (Joseph Fiennes).

Based on Richard Ellman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Wilde, Brian Gilbert’s biopic stars Stephen Fry as the flamboyant literary icon and Jude Law as his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father exposed Wilde’s homosexuality and had him tried for gross indecency in 1895.