Unlikely biopic casting

Here's Michael Douglas in one of his indelible earlier roles - slobbering over Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (don't look at the camera, Mike!). It is safe to assume he will not be doing this sort of thing as Liberace. Photograph: Kobal

Who's the bodacious English miss doing pull-ups on the fence? Why, it is none other than Jane Austen as played by Anne Hathaway. It could be worse. It could be Beatrix Potter as played by Renee Zellweger. Photograph: Kobal

The esteemed Sir Anthony Hopkins has impersonated Richard Nixon (in Nixon) and a black man (in The Human Stain). Here he is as Picasso, in festive, floral mood as he prepares to paint Guernica. Photograph: Kobal

Oscars at the ready! The Who's Roger Daltrey plays composer Franz Liszt in "the erotic, exotic rock fantasy" Lisztomania. For good measure, the film also stars Paul Nicholas as Wagner, Rick Wakeman as "Thor" and Ringo Starr as the Pope. Photograph: Kobal

Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst) and Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard) take a boat trip in The Cat's Meow. Sad to report that the film promptly sank without trace. Photograph: Kobal

"And how long have you been a robber? Four foot one? Err, jolly good." John Cleese plays a perplexed Robin Hood (alongside some diminutive merry men) in the 1981 fantasy Time Bandits. Photograph: Kobal

The venerable Quentin Crisp makes a a grand entrance as Elizabeth I in the 1992 film Orlando. Crisp died years before Todd Haynes embarked on his Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There - otherwise we would surely have seen him singing Subterranean Homesick Blues. Photograph: Kobal

Night at the Museum made a galloping error when it cast Robin Williams as the barnstorming US president Teddy Roosevelt. The horse would have been a better choice. Photograph: Kobal

Who better to play revered English physicist Sir Isaac Newton than Mr Harpo Marx? Here he is outlining his theories of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. Notebooks out, students. Photograph: Kobal

John Wayne is ... Genghis Khan! Actually it transpired that shocking miscasting was the least of The Conqueror's problems. The film was shot on the edge of a nuclear testing site and in the subsequent years 91 of the 220 cast and crew-members contracted cancer. Wayne was one of them. Photograph: Kobal