This Is the Greatest Movie Hero of All Time

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Heroes can be divided into two major categories: those that are fictional and those that are real people. The list of fictional heroes goes back as far as recorded history, with some of the most prominent characters still known today. Achilles is one, and Ulysses, the primary character of the Odyssey, is another. Even mythological heroes this ancient appear in popular films. A fine example is Achilles, played by Brad Pitt, in “Troy,” which was released in 2004.

Real-life heroes, at least the best-known ones, tend to be from more recent periods. Many are from the military, like Ulysses S. Grant and Alvin York. York was played by movie great Gary Cooper in the film “Alvin York.” Cooper won an Oscar for his role in the 1941 film.

Movies based on 20th-century characters also have been well received. Among these are superheroes like Superman and Batman, of course, but there are also characters who are ordinary in many ways, such as Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, or Marge Gunderson, the mom-to-be police chief in “Fargo.” There are also people who do extraordinary things under difficult circumstances. For instance, Atticus Finch, the lawyer who defends an African-American man in a small Southern town in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Oskar Schindler, who saves Jews from the Holocaust at great personal risk in “Schindler’s List.”

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The American Film Institute’s “AFI’s 100 Years…100 Heroes & Villains” was our source for the greatest movie hero of all time.

The greatest movie hero of all time is the aforementioned Atticus Finch. He was played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film. Finch is also the hero of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” on which the movie is based. Finch, a lawyer, represents an African-American man wrongly accused of rаpe in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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