Taking a few cues from history’s villains

Monster: Genghis Khan

Actors who’ve played him: John Wayne in “The Conqueror” (1956); Omar Sharif in “Genghis Khan” (1965)

Portrait: Wayne was miscast as the Mongol chief in this notorious turkey produced by Howard Hughes and directed by Dick Powell. “Genghis Khan” is equally a heap of hooey but without the unintentional humor of “The Conqueror.”

Monster: Captain Bligh

Actors who’ve played him: Charles Laughton in “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1935); Trevor Howard in “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1962); Anthony Hopkins in “The Bounty” (1984)

Portrait: Laughton brought the ruthless, sadistic British captain of the H.M.S. Bounty vividly to life in the Academy Award-winning version that also starred Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. Howard was the only thing that kept Lewis Milestone’s bloated, big-budget 1962 version afloat. In 1984, Hopkins added humanity and dimension to his portrayal of Bligh.

Monster: Nero

Actors who’ve played him: Charles Laughton in “The Sign of the Cross,” from 1932, and Peter Ustinov in

“Quo Vadis,” from 1951

Portrait: Laughton gave one of his great over-the-top performances as the cruel, mad Roman emperor who sucked his thumb and played his fiddle as the Eternal City burned. Ustinov received an Oscar nomination for his deliciously vile turn in MGM’s hokey but sumptuous biblical epic.

Monster: Caligula

Actors who’ve played him: John Hurt in the miniseries “I, Claudius” (1976); Malcolm McDowell in the X-rated “Caligula” (1979)

Portrait: Hurt’s electric, eccentric performance as the violent, ambitious and sexually perverse Roman emperor made him a star; McDowell’s stock, though, didn’t rise in Hollywood with the explicit, inane take on the rise and fall of the Roman emperor that was produced and co-directed by Penthouse magazine’s Bob Guccione.

Monster: Attila the Hun

Actor who played him: Jack Palance in “Sign of the Pagan” (1955)

Portrait: Director Douglas Sirk of “All That Heaven Allows” lent his visual eye and penchant for high melodrama to this silly but entertaining epic that finds the ruthless Attila hoping to conquer the divided Roman empire. Palance chews the scenery in a performance full of histrionics but little factual history.

Monster: Joseph Stalin

Actor who played him: Robert Duvall in the TV movie “Stalin” (1992)

Portrait: Although Duvall’s expressive face is hidden behind masses of makeup and a big bushy mustache, he still gives a pit-bull performance as the Russian Communist leader who was known in America during World War II as “Uncle Joe” but who killed millions of his countrymen and even members of his own family.

Monster: Jim Jones

Actors who’ve played him: Powers Booth in the TV movie “Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones” (1980) and Stuart Whitman in “Guyana, el crimen del siglo” (1980)

Portrait: Booth won an Emmy for his terrifying performance as the charismatic “reverend” of the People’s Temple cult who led his followers to Guyana and their eventual mass suicide in 1978. “Guyana,” also known as “Cult of the Damned,” was a quickie, low-budget feature made in Mexico with an over-the-top turn by Whitman, here called Rev. James Johnson.

Monster: Richard III

Actors who’ve played him: Laurence Olivier in “Richard III” (1956) and Ian McKellen in “Richard III” (1995)

Portrait: Contemporary historical studies show that the humpbacked British monarch wasn’t the scheming, murderous devil of Shakespeare’s play, written a century after Richard’s rule. But that version has been fun for actors to portray. Olivier, sporting a particularly large hump, hawklike nose and a thatch of black hair, received an Oscar nomination for his performance in the 1956 film that he also directed. McKellen excels in Richard Loncraine’s version of Shakespeare, set in a fascist England of the 1930s.

Monster: Benito Mussolini

Actors who’ve played him: Bob Hoskins in the TV miniseries “Mussolini: The Decline and Fall of Il Duce” (1985) and George C. Scott in “Mussolini: The Untold Story,” also a miniseries from 1985

Portrait: Scott and Hoskins both shaved their head to play the fascist Italian dictator, and both strut and preen as the ill-fated Il Duce. Perhaps the best performance of the Italian dictator was by Jack Oakie in Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire, “The Great Dictator, in which he’s the idiotic, pompous Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria.

-- Susan King