After the re-election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, he has been constantly in the headlines, cartoon strips of memes. Unlike past President Ronald Reagan, Trump is not an actor (though has made screen and TV appearances), but he stirs up enough drama. In Hollywood movies, actors have played Presidents, some real, some fictional, with varying degrees of success.
A pick of just ten films out of the hundred with a US President in the lead:
Dave (1993):
In Ivan Reitman’s comedy, Kevin Kline plays Dave, the lookalike of a fictional President, Bill Mitchell, who is hired by the Secret Service as a stand-in, while the real man is out on an adulterous assignation. But Mitchell has a stroke while he is at it, and Dave is stuck in the role, and caught up in internal intrigues. But, he complicates his life by falling in love with the First Lady (Sigourney Weaver).
The American President (1995):
Michael Douglas played a recently widowed president, in Rob Reiner’s film, who falls in love with a political activist, before he is due for re-election, and that is enough fodder for the press and a rival senator to attack his character and pull him down.
Nixon (1995):
Anthony Hopkins played Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s biopic—a no-holds barred film about the politician who rode to the top of the anti-war movement against America’s involvement in Vietnam, and then went out in a wave of shame following the Watergate scandal.
Air Force One (1997):
In Wolfgang Petersen’s film, action hero Harrison Ford plays a fighting president, who strives to save hostages travelling on the presidential aircraft, when communist radicals hijack it, with his family on board.
Primary Colours (1998):
In Mike Nichols’s satire loosely based on Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, John Travolta played a philandering governor, with a rampaging libido, who has to fight a sex scandal if he has to be elected to the White House. Emma Thompson played his ambitious wife.
Thirteen Days (2000):
Many actors have played John F. Kennedy, but Bruce Greenwood played him in emergency mode in Roger Donaldson’s film about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the imbroglio involving the Soviets, that had long-lasting effects on the world.
W (2008):
Oliver Stone cast Josh Brolin as of George W. Bush, a powerful yet unpopular president, in the sprawling biopic that chronicled his life from the college days to his turbulent years as President and in the 2004 re-election campaign.
Vantage Point (2008):
In Pete Travis’s film, William Hurt played President Harry Ashton, who becomes the target of an assassination attempt, which is examined from different perspectives and points of view of several characters.
10 Hyde Park On Hudson (2012):
Bill Murray played Franklin D Roosevelt in Roger Michell’s film that portrays him as a romantically vulnerable man, who has an affair with a distant cousin, Daisy Suckley (Laura Linney), at a time when the King and Queen of England are visiting his Hudson Valley estate.
Lincoln (2012):
Daniel Day-Lewis deservedly won the Oscar for his sympathetic portrayal of America’s most revered and reviled President, whose anti-slavery stance led the country to civil war. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film captured him not as a self-righteous hero, but as a man forced to fight every inch of the way for his principles, and deeply affected by the massacre of his countrymen on the battlefield.
