Look-alike

Research

Notable look-alikes

• A popular story about King Umberto I of Italy tells of the king eating in a restaurant and discovering the owner was his dead-ringer double. The story goes that upon talking to the man, Umberto learned of a string of coincidences between their lives, such as: the two men had been born in the same town on the same day, and had both married a woman with the same name, and the restaurant had opened on the day of Umberto's coronation. Umberto's assassination in 1900 is said to have happened the same day that he heard the news that the restaurateur had died in a shooting. This story is cited often in popular culture and may have been embellished somewhat.

• The United Kingdom's King George V and Russia's Tsar Nicholas II, who were first cousins, bore an uncanny resemblance. Their facial features were distinguishable only up close, particularly their eyes. At George's wedding in 1893, according to The Times of London, the crowd may have mistaken Nicholas for George due to their similar beards and attire.
• An urban legend claims that Charlie Chaplin entered one of the many Chaplin look-alike contests and lost. It is retold in the musical Chaplin.
• Mikheil Gelovani, a Georgian actor and Joseph Stalin look-alike, played the Soviet leader in propaganda films of the 1930s and 1940s.
• In 1944, shortly before D-Day, M. E. Clifton James, who bore a close resemblance to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, was sent to Gibraltar and North Africa, in order to deceive the Germans about the location of the upcoming invasion. This story was the subject of a book and film, I Was Monty's Double.
• A notable conspiracy theory holds that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a Canadian policeman named William Shears Campbell.
• In the 1970s, actor-comedian Richard M. Dixon, look-alike to then-President Richard Nixon, gained some celebrity, portraying the president in the films, Richard and The Faking of the President. He also appeared in director Woody Allen's initially unreleased short film Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story.
• Jeannette Charles often worked in film as a look-alike to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II.
• British stuntman Vic Armstrong acted as Harrison Ford's body double in all the films of the original Indiana Jones trilogy. Reportedly, Armstrong looked so much like Harrison Ford that the crew members on set were constantly mistaking him for Ford.
• When Uffe Ellemann-Jensen was Denmark's foreign minister, he was often compared to Danish pop singer Johnny Reimar.
• Saddam Hussein allegedly employed several look-alikes for political purposes during his Iraq reign. According to a CBS 60 Minutes segment in late January 2008, Saddam Hussein denied to an American interrogator that he had employed doubles.
• The BBC comedy programme Doubletake made extensive use of look-alikes playing their doubles in apparently embarrassing situations, seen through CCTV cameras and amateur video, using distance shots and shaky camera-work to disguise the true identity of those being filmed. Due to the nature of this programme and conditions of filming, many of the world's most authentic lookalikes boycotted the project leaving the producer to rely on the careful use of soft focus, lighting and carefully positioned camera angles to make the mainly amateur lookalikes resemble the characters they portrayed.
• Armando Iannucci's Friday Night Armistice featured "the bus of Dianas", a bus full of Princess Diana look-alikes which was dispatched to "care" at the sites of various minor tragedies.
• Steve Sires, a look-alike of Microsoft's Bill Gates, came to attention when he attempted to trademark "Microsortof", and subsequently acted in Microsoft commercials. He appeared as Gates in the films Nothing So Strange and The Social Network.
• British Celebrity Big Brother contestant Chantelle Houghton worked briefly and unsuccessfully for a look-alike agency as a Paris Hilton look-alike, earning the nickname "Paris Travelodge". By the time Chantelle Houghton won series 4 of Celebrity Big Brother, the same agency had already signed up a professional model who made a more convincing Paris Hilton look-alike and who was briefly also offered as a fake "Chantelle".
• British Richard and Judy ran a competition for Little Britain Lookalikes in 2005. After the live final broadcast on Friday, 28 January 2005, on Channel Four, two winning contestants, Gavin Pomfret and Stuart Morrison, formed a Little Britain tribute act called "Littler Britain."
• Dolly Parton has stated that she lost a 'Dolly Parton look-alike contest'.
• In 2008, a friend pointed out to Bronx native Louis Ortiz his striking resemblance to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Ortiz, initially as a money-making venture, sought gigs as an Obama impersonator. Ryan Murdock produced a documentary film about Ortiz's experiences, Bronx Obama.
• Two of the Parti Québécois's candidates, Bertrand St-Arnaud and Bernard Drainville, are considered look-alikes.
• Larissa Tudor looked strikingly similar to former Grand Duchess Tatiana of Russia. Larissa's background was sketchy and included a lot of irregularities. After her death in 1926 it was rumored that she was the former grand duchess. When author Michael Occleshaw wrote a book about Larissa 60 years after her death, those who had known her identified a picture of the former Grand Duchess Tatiana as being Larissa.
• Howard X is a professional impersonator who looks like the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
• Former basketball player Andrew Bynum has famously been compared to actor Tracy Morgan
• Chad Smith, the drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has been called a look-alike of actor Will Ferrell.
• Suzie Kennedy is a British impersonator who looks like the actress Marilyn Monroe, and in 2020 impersonated her on America's Got Talent.
• Two baseball players, both named Brady Feigl, share an uncanny resemblance to each other – even sharing the same height. Coincidentally, both players are pitchers for their respective teams, and both had elbow injuries that were treated by the same doctor.

  Fictional look-alikes

Literature

• In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "William Wilson", a man is followed by his double.
• In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella The Double, an insecure, gauche government clerk in St. Petersburg, Russia, Yakov Pyotrovich Golyadkin, psychotically encounters a double of himself who looks identical to him but has all the charm, unctuousness, and social skills that he himself lacks.
• Alexandre Dumas, père's, The Man in the Iron Mask involves King Louis XIV of France and the King's identical twin.
• In Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities, two characters, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, bear an uncanny resemblance to one another.
• In The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, the protagonist meets two women, Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie, who strongly resemble one another.
• In Mark Twain's first historical fiction, the novel The Prince and the Pauper, Prince Edward, son of Henry VIII of England, and his pauper look-alike, Tom Canty, trade places.
• In Anthony Hope's novel The Prisoner of Zenda, a man impersonates a king he closely resembles, after the king is abducted on the eve of his coronation.
• Bolesław Prus' historical novel Pharaoh features several cases of look-alikes. The characters include the Haranian Phut and his look-alike, and the protagonist Ramses and his look-alike and nemesis, Lykon. Also, chapter 33 makes reference to look-alikes of an earlier pharaoh, Ramses the Great.
• Georg Kaiser's 1917 play The Coral depicts a powerful industrialist whose male secretary is his exact double. The secretary's duties include impersonating his employer at public functions. Other employees can tell the two men apart only by the fact that the secretary always wears a coral watch-fob.
• The Living and the Dead, 1954 novel by collaborators Boileau-Narcejac, on which Alfred Hitchcock based his 1958 film Vertigo.
• In Robert Heinlein's novel Double Star, actor Lawrence Smith is approached to impersonate prominent politician John Joseph Bonforte, who has been kidnapped. Despite his initial antipathy toward Bonforte's policies, Smythe eventually comes to admire Bonforte. He continues this performance through an election and, when Bonforte dies, continues in the role for the rest of his life, in honor of Bonforte's legacy.
• In Daphne du Maurier's novel The Scapegoat, an Englishman meets his double, a French aristocrat, while visiting France, and is forced into changing places with him, finding himself caught up in all the intrigues and passions of his double's complex family.
• In Richard Powell's novel Don Quixote, U.S.A., Arthur Peabody Goodpasture, an inept Peace Corps volunteer and the spitting image of El Gavilan, a revolutionary leader in the fictional Republic of San Marco in South America, is forced to assume the identity of El Gavilan after the original is kidnapped and taken to the Soviet Union when El Gavilan's plot to have Goodpasture abducted by the Russians goes wrong.
• In Jack Higgins's 1975 novel The Eagle Has Landed, Nazi German paratroopers attempt to abduct British prime minister Winston Churchill from an English village he is visiting. It subsequently transpires that the actual Churchill had been elsewhere while a political decoy visited the village.
• "The Leader and the Damned" by Colin Forbes is a secret history thriller whose plot is based on the assumption that Adolf Hitler was assassinated in 1943, a bomb completely destroying his body. The Nazi hierarchy kept this as a top secret and got a double to impersonate Hitler, and it was this double who led Nazi Germany until its final demise in 1945.
• In Clive Cussler's 1984 novel Deep Six, a double is used after the U.S. president is kidnapped by Korean and Soviet agents.
• In David Lodge's 1984 novel Small World, the protagonist keeps running into two women, Angelica and Lily, who are identical twin sisters with confusingly different personalities.
• Christopher Priest's novel The Prestige features two rival magicians, one of whom uses his twin brother as a double in a disappearing-and-reappearing act.
• José Saramago's 2002 novel The Double traces the intertwining lives of a history teacher and his bit-actor identical double, one of whom ends up dead while the other ends up living with the other's widow.
• In Tana French's 2008 novel, The Likeness, detective Cassie Maddox has doppelgänger Lexie Madison who adopts the same alias Maddox used in an undercover investigation.
• In Britain's Private Eye magazine, a long-running satirical feature of the letters section intentionally reverses the captions on look-alike photographs.
• In A.M. Kherbash's novel Lesath the protagonist is mistaken for an escaped inmate and is incarcerated in a remote facility.