9 Creators Who Regretted Killing Off Movie Characters

In the case of James Cameron's Titanic, it's less that the industrious filmmaker outright regretted killing off First Officer William Murdoch (Ewan Stewart) - a real-life figure who indeed died in the 1912 catastrophe - but the means through which he depicted it.

In the film, Murdoch is in charge of the Titanic's bridge on the night it's hit by an iceberg.

During the rush for lifeboats, Murdoch panics and shoots two young men dead, and upon realising the gravity of his actions promptly shoots himself in the head.

It's one of Titanic's most memorably bleak moments, and yet, entirely fictionalised by Cameron.

This unsurprisingly caused quite the stink with both historians and Murdoch's living descendants, who felt that it mischaracterised him as a villain despite there being no eyewitness evidence to this effect.

Fox vice-president Scott Neeson ultimately went to Murdoch's home village to smooth things over with his family, while Cameron, rarely one to apologise or back down, more recently expressed regret about portraying him this way:

"In the case of First Officer William McMaster Murdoch, I took the liberty of showing him shoot somebody and then shoot himself... He's a named character; he wasn't a generic officer. We don't know that he did that, but you know the storyteller in me says, 'Oh.' I start connecting the dots: he was on duty, he's carrying all this burden with him, made him an interesting character... But I was being a screenwriter... I wasn't thinking about being a historian, and I think I wasn't as sensitive about the fact that his family, his survivors might feel offended by that and they were."

Sadly, though, of the hundreds of millions of people who've seen Titanic in the last 25 years, how many of them are even remotely aware of this controversy or Cameron's distortion of reality?

Cameron has inadvertently rewritten the man's history for the masses, and there's very little that can be done about that.