10 Famous Movie Moments Made Possible By Totally Ignoring History

3. Patsey Never Asked Soloman To End Her Life; Mistress Epps Tried To Get Soloman To Secretly Murder Her - 12 Years A Slave

One of the most powerful and heartbreaking sequences in recent Best Picture winner 12 Years A Slave sees slave girl Patsey - played wonderfully by the beautiful Lupita Nyong'o, who won an Oscar for her role - with whom protagonist Soloman Northup finds himself shacked up with on the sinister Epps plantation, begging him to take her to the swamp and drown her after she has finally had enough with all the ill-treatment, emotional abuse and horrific torture. To this, Soloman refuses, but is later forced to whip his friend into submission by his master. Though this marks one of the movie's most memorable scenes, it's also one of very few times that the picture actually deviates from the source material - no such conversation actually ever occurred between Patsey and Solomon in real life. The line from the book - "Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see suffer, and more than once, she tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death, and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp" - actually implies that Mistress Epps tried to convince Soloman to murder Patsey.