The Best Comedies Based on True Stories

Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, and Madonna star as baseball players in a female league founded during World War II to fill the void left by men at war. The runaway hit was famous for Hanks’ line to a crying player, “There’s no crying in baseball.”

The film is based on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, created in 1943. Three hundred women tried out for teams in the league in the spring of that year from all over the United States and Canada.

An Australian Kelpie, or red dog, searches for his lost master in the outback and in doing so brings a disparate community together.

The movie was the first exposure that many people had to the Australian Kelpie breed. The plot was based on the true story of a Kelpie who hitched rides and traveled throughout Western Australia’s Pilbara region. The beloved canine was a member of social clubs, a transport workers union, and was even given a bank account with the Bank of New South Wales. A statue of him stands in Dampier, Western Australia.

Taron Egerton plays the indomitable Eddie Edwards, a ski jumper who represented Great Britain in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, despite opposition from various British athletic organizations in part because he was far-sighted and weighed more than most competitors.

Edwards became the first British ski jumper since 1928 to compete in the Olympics. The bespectacled Edwards charmed the public with his spirit and Olympic ambition. He finished last in both the 70-meter and 90-meter events at the 1988 Winter Olympics – but this biopic was a winner, becoming the highest grossing British film of 2016..

Emma Thompson stars as P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books. Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) had promised his daughters that he would turn the books into a movie. It took him 20 years of courting Travers before she flew to California to meet him, and it took another two weeks for Disney and his team to convince Travers to allow them to make a Mary Poppins film.

In the process, Travers revisited her childhood. She’d based the character of Mr. Banks – patriarch of the London family that Mary Poppins helps – in part on her father. The film became one of the best-loved Disney movies of the era.

Jillian Bell plays New York party girl Brittany O’Neill, who’s trapped in a world of booze, late nights, lousy food, and a nowhere job. After her doctor tells her how unhealthy she is, her roommate, playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo, helps convince her to take up running. She builds up to running in the 1984 New York City Marathon, and Colaizzo tells her real-life story – on which the film is based.

Set in the 1880s, “Topsy-Turvy” is the story of operetta writers W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, whose partnership nearly dissolved during a creative dry spell. Then they wrote the zany and flamboyant “The Mikado,” which changed their career trajectory.

The two-time Oscar-winning film was directed by Mike Leigh, a British director known more for his depictions of contemporary working life than period pieces. Leigh wanted to show the economic and social environment of the time as well as the sometimes tortuous creative process.

Based on the Alan Bennett play “The Madness of George III,” this Academy Award-winning film tells the story of the 18th-century British monarch’s declining mental health and his deteriorating relationship with his eldest son, the Prince of Wales – and how his ministers considered running the country without his involvement until an unconventional doctor (Ian Holm) seems to cure him..

A research project based at St George’s, University of London, concluded that George III did in fact suffer from mental illness.

This is a black comedy about the scramble for power among Joseph Stalin’s subordinates after the Soviet dictator died at his dacha in 1953. Stalin’s inner circle – Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambom), Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale), and Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) – were at his dacha to watch a movie with Stalin before he died, and the film’s depiction of the hours after Stalin’s death, including the chaotic efforts at planning his funeral, are considered accurate.

Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly become one of film’s greatest and more endearing comedy duos in “Stan & Ollie.” The film finds the aging comedians trying to restart their film careers in what becomes their final act – a grueling theater tour of post-war Britain that at times pulled the two apart.

Laurel and Hardy did tour Great Britain in the 1950s to try to restart their career, but they each had health issues and their career was never fully resurrected, though their tours of the country lifted the spirits of a British people still recovering from World War II.

In “The Disaster Artist,” wannabe actor Greg Sestero encounters out-there Tommy Wiseau in an acting class. They become friends and go to Hollywood hoping they can realize their dreams. The Franco brothers play the two aspiring actors.

The film tells the mostly true story behind Wiseau’s infamous movie “The Room,” often called the worst movie ever made – though since its release in 2003, it has gained a cult following.

“Fighting with My Family” is about a family of wrestlers in Great Britain whose younger members want to join World Wrestling Entertainment. Dwayne Johnson produced and stars in the film. Though some license was taken with some of the characters’ storylines, the movie is mostly true-to-life.

This is a film about Lee Israel, a freelance writer fallen on hard times who starts forging celebrity letters and steals actual celebrity letters, selling them to dealers to make money. In June 1993, Israel was caught and pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to transport stolen property, for which she served six months under house arrest and five years of federal probation. She also was barred by almost all libraries and archives. Melissa McCarthy was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Israel.

The “Green Book” is an unlikely buddy movie about an Italian-American bouncer named Tony “Lip” Vallelonga hired by Black classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley as a driver to take him on a tour of the Deep South in the 1960s. The movie won three Oscars, including Best Picture and a Best Supporting Actor (for Mahershala Ali). Vallelonga’s son, Nick, who remembered meeting Shirley, co-wrote the movie. The title refers to “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a guide to businesses around the country where Blacks could safely eat, get gas, and lodge.

In “I, Tonya,” Margot Robbie plays Tonya Harding, a hyper-competitive figure skater from a challenging background. The movie breaks down the wall between actor and audience, with Robbie’s Tonya explaining what role she played in the attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan. Allison Janney won a best supporting actress Oscar as Harding’s chain-smoking, abusive mother.

Oscar winners Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Tilda Swinton star in this meta-film about a lovelorn screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, who becomes desperate after failing to successfully adapt the Susan Orlean book “The Orchid Thief” for the big screen. Kaufman actually had great trouble adapting the book. Cage, who plays Charlie Kaufman, also plays his fictional brother.

“BlacKkKlansman” was based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first African-American police officer and detective in Colorado Springs, Colorado, who successfully infiltrated the local Ku Klux Klan chapter with the help of a Jewish colleague in 1978 and ’79. He later turned his experiences into a memoir called “Black Klansman,” basis for this film. The movie won a best adapted screenplay Academy Award.

“The Big Short” is an Oscar-winning film based on a book by Michael Lewis, depicting actual events leading up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The crisis began after a group of iconoclastic investors discovered that subprime mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations were essentially worthless. The CDOs were little more than repackaged bundles of mortgages issued to less-than-creditworthy homeowners.

In this film, a cynical journalist writes a story about an elderly Irish woman’s search for her son, who was taken away from her decades ago as an infant when she was forced into a convent, and adopted by American parents. The man turned out to become Michael Hess, a lawyer for the Republican National Committee during the Reagan and Bush administrations, who died from complications related to AIDS.

Nominated for four Oscars, the film soars on the chemistry between Steve Coogan, who played the journalist, and Judi Dench, in the title role.

“50/50” was inspired by the true story of a 27-year-old man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who’s diagnosed with cancer with 50/50 odds of survival, and his efforts to deal with the disease.

The film was written by Will Reiser, somewhat based on his own experience with cancer. Critics hailed Reiser’s screenplay and Gordon-Levitt’s performance.

Johnny Depp plays the cross-dressing filmmaker who was long on ambition and short on talent. Wood made some of the most cringeworthy movies of all time, such as “Plan 9 From Outer Space” and the gender-questioning “Glen or Glenda.” Martin Landau plays aging ghoul actor Bela Lugosi, who appeared in Wood’s movies, and won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance.

Eddie Murphy made a career comeback in this biopic, playing Rudy Ray Moore – a stand-up comic who created an alter-ego named Dolemite. The character became an underground sensation, starring in a series of blaxploitation films such as “Dolemite,” “The Human Tornado,” and “Disco Godfather.”

During the tenure of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984, miners in the Dulais Valley in South Wales went on strike. They had unexpected allies in their corner – lesbians and homosexuals who drove to Wales from London to support them. The group called itself Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Bill Nighy plays a miners’ union chief, with Dominic West as one of the LGSM members.

Pakistan-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily Gordon fell in love after they met following one of Nanjiani’s stand-up performances, but their relationship came under pressure because of a cultural clash. When Emily contracted a mysterious illness, Kumail stood by her, faced her family, his own family’s expectations, and his true feelings.

The true story came from events in the lives of Nanjiani and Gordon, who eventually marry. Nanjiani played himself in the film and Zoe Kazan portrayed Emily.

“Almost Famous” is a semi-autobiographical film by Cameron Crowe, who wrote “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Jerry Maguire.” The movie centers on a teen journalist writing a story for Rolling Stone about a rising band in the ’70s. The young man navigates the world of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll with the help of groupie (Kate Hudson in an Oscar-nominated performance) and the band’s guitarist, Billy Crudup. Crowe took home an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Silent-movie comedy legend Buster Keaton plays a train engineer rejected by the Confederate military during the Civil War because of his vital civilian role. Looking to help the Rebel cause, he tries to recapture his locomotive, taken by Union spies.

“The General” is based on a raid led by Union civilian scout James J. Andrews that’s known as the Great Locomotive Chase. He planned to damage the Western & Atlantic Railroad from Atlanta to Chattanooga, to disrupt supplies to the Confederates. Andrews and 22 volunteers stole the train in Big Shanty, Georgia.