10 Beloved Movie Heroes Who Are Actually Trash

2. P.T. Barnum - The Greatest Showman

If you took 2017's hit musical The Greatest Showman at face value, legendary showman and entrepreneur P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) was not only a great businessman but also a pretty swell guy, too.

Building a circus empire out of nothing and giving his performers a grand stage on which to showcase their abilities, the film holds Barnum up as a champion for those with unconventional talents, while depicting precious little of his darker side.

Yes, there are hints of a possible affair with striking Swedish singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), but overall the movie presents a cleaned-up depiction of Barnum's rise to fame.

In reality, Barnum's most egregious infractions include buying an elderly, blind and near-paralysed black woman named Joice Heth, who he toured around the U.S. as a 161-year-old woman, and upon her death even charged admission for her public autopsy. Nice.

Elsewhere many of his early attractions relied on exploiting racial stereotypes - and indeed, racism itself - such as billing a black man as "half-man, half-monkey".

That's to say nothing of the flagrant, well-documented abuse of animals under his possession, especially elephants. Animals were frequently kept in cramped and inhumane conditions which often led to their deaths.

Though Barnum did become a politician later in life and ultimately rallied against slavery, his early successes are forever tarnished by his unscrupulous methods, which the film itself unsurprisingly decided to completely ignore.

It's almost as if a figure of Barnum's ruthlessness needed a more grounded, gritty biopic rather than a doting, glossy musical...