Dramatic biography

Film genre

A biographical film or biopic ()^[1] is a film that dramatizes the life of an actual person or group of people. Such films show the life of a historical person and the central character's real name is used.^[2] They differ from docudrama films and historical drama films in that they attempt to comprehensively tell a single person's life story or at least the most historically important years of their lives.^[3]

Context

Biopic scholars include George F. Custen of the College of Staten Island and Dennis P. Bingham of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Custen, in Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992), regards the genre as having died with the Hollywood studio era, and in particular, Darryl F. Zanuck.^[4] On the other hand, Bingham's 2010 study Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre^[5] shows how it perpetuates as a codified g