10 Must-Watch Artist Biopics

Image via Complex Original

Year: 2014
Director: Mike Leigh

Famed for his gritty portrayals of British life, Mike Leigh casts Timothy Spall, an actor he regularly uses, to play the role of Joseph Mallord William Turner. The film looks at the British landscape painter (1775-1851), famed for his sunsets and seascapes, and focuses on his painting techniques, his relationships with critics and other artists, his love of ladies, and his rather disgustingly frequent grunts and coughs throughout its two and a half hour running time.

Year: 2002

Director: Julie Taymor

Salma Hayek is captivating in this film, which tells the story of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her turbulent relationship with fellow artist Diego Rivera (played by Alfred Molina). It’s hard to re-imagine the film with Madonna playing the lead, but apparently she fought hard to get the role (and thankfully didn’t). The film highlights many of Kahlo’s key works and animates them in a surprisingly non-tacky way to illustrate Kahlo’s thought-process behind the paintings.

Year: 2006

Director: Raúl Ruiz

John Malkovich plays Austrian painter Gustav Klimt in this movie that primarily focuses on Klimt’s love life, including his pursuit of Lea de Castro and his subsequent death from syphilis. Unfortunately, this makes the entire film’s plot rather questionable given that Klimt died from flu and that we’re not entirely sure if he ever had the sexually transmitted disease either. Nevertheless, it’s an enjoyable portrayal of Vienna and Paris at the turn of the 20th century and Nikolai Kinski provides a star turn as Egon Schiele.

Year: 1995
Director: Christopher Hampton

Dora Carrington was a British artist whose personal life was significantly more interesting that her artwork, which was probably what convinced Emma Thompson to play her. Loosely associated with the Bloomsbury Group, she lived with the gay writer Lytton Strachey, but married Ralph Partidge, forming a bohemian love triangle. Strachey (played by Jonathan Pryce) remained her one true love, and Carrington committed suicide aged 38, two months after Strachey’s death from cancer.

Year: 2006
Director: George Hickenlooper

According to IMBD, Andy Warhol has been portrayed in 40 productions, from an episode of Futurama to Men in Black III. There hasn’t really been a film that solely focuses on him, but Factory Girl, which looks at his relationship with supermuse Edie Sedgwick, probably comes closest to the lot. Guy Pearce plays Warhol to Sienna Miller’s Sedgwick and beautifully captures Warhol’s ticks, cadences, and general aloofness.

Year: 1996
Director: Julian Schnabel

Who better to make a film about an artist than another artist? Especially since the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat refused to allow his works to be used in the film, so Schnabel painted the copies himself. Jeffrey Wright plays Basquiat, David Bowie plays Andy Warhol (we told you Warhol is in a lot of films), and Benicio del Toro, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Christopher Walken, and Willem Dafoe are among the rest of the star-studded cast. The film tells the story of the Brooklyn-born artist’s rise to fame and his death from a heroin overdose aged 27.

Year: 2006
Director: Steven Shainberg

Although subtitled An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, director Steven Shainberg, best known for his film Secretary, worked again with screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, using Patricia Bosworth's biography of American photographer Arbus for source material, but with additional fictional flourishes. Nicole Kidman plays a mesmerizing Arbus, and we are introduced to her various photographic subjects, including Lionel Sweeney (played by Robert Downey Jr.) who suffers from hypertrichosis—a condition informally known as “werewolf syndrome” due to the resulting excessive body hair.

Year: 1996
Director: James Ivory

This lavish Merchant Ivory production tells the story of Picasso (played by Anthony Hopkins) and one of his many lovers—Françoise Gilot (played by Natascha McElhone), who is the mother of Claude and Paloma Picasso. We are also introduced to his previous lovers, including Dora Maar (played by Julianne Moore). The film primarily concentrates on the stormy relationship between Picasso and Gilot, no doubt partially due to the fact that they couldn’t get permission to show any of Picasso’s art works in the film.

Year: 2000
Director: Ed Harris

Playing abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock as well as directing the film about him was a labour of love for Ed Harris. He was inspired to make the film after his father gave him a biography of the artist (because Pollock and Harris bear a strong resemblance to each other). The film charts Pollock’s rise to fame in the 1940s, in between his womanising, alcoholism, and marriage to fellow artist Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Oscar for the role). Harris himself gained 30lbs for playing Pollock near the end of his life and did all the on-screen painting himself.

Year: 2014
Director: Tim Burton

Tim Burton’s latest film looks at the extraordinary story of 1950s American artist Margaret Keane and her husband Walter, who took the credit for all of her portraits of people with manga-like big eyes. The case only came to light when the couple got divorced and Margaret fought for ownership of her work. Kate Hudson and Thomas Haden Church were initially cast in the roles back in 2008, but the film was then pushed back and in 2012, and Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Reynolds were scheduled to take the roles. But by the time that Burton was given the directing reins, Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz had nabbed the roles.