10 Outrageous Movie Characters You Won't Believe Exist In Real Life

7. Shrek - Shrek

This is another one that requires a little imagination - there was no Ogre out in the wilderness that sounded like Mike Myers and was friends with an Eddie Murphy-sounding donkey. But there was Maurice Tillet! Born in 1903, Tillet was a french writer/poet turned wrestler who suffered from acromegaly, which caused his bones to grow at an alarming rate and eventually made him look disfigured. The story of Shrek, about a green ogre who rescues a princess, was first imagined as a book by William Steig in 1990, and eleven years later the first film was finished. The animators who worked on adapting the story of Shrek into a movie took some of their inspiration for his shape from Tillet's memorable mug. Multiple casts of Tillet's face were made during his life, to preserve a life-size record of his famous face. When Tillet took to wrestling after accepting his "deformity," spectators referred to him as "The Freak Ogre of the Ring" - but not long after he became better known as "The French Angel."