Few men have lived lives so perfectly calibrated for dramatic adaptation as Mark Antony. Rome's most charismatic bad boy — the general who could drain a wineskin with common soldiers one evening and sail into Alexandria the next, perfumed like divinity, trailing music and international incident in equal measure.

Picture: broad shoulders carrying world-class ambition, voice that could move Senate debates or seduce Egyptian queens, appetites so legendary they required their own biographical footnotes. The man who made every entrance feel like theatre and every exit like tragedy waiting to happen.

Hollywood couldn't resist that kind of raw material. Neither could Shakespeare, who understood that some historical figures come pre-loaded with dramatic arc — the loyal lieutenant who becomes revolutionary, the Roman who abandons empire for love, the general whose greatest victories feel like defeat and whose final defeat feels like victory.

Over centuries, Antony has been recast, rewritten, romanticised — sometimes heroic soldier, sometimes tragic fool, always the doomed lover to Cleopatra's glittering queen. Every actor who's worn his laurel crown brings different shade to the man who blurred boundaries between history and performance, politics and passion.

Here are the leading men who've tried to capture lightning in ancient armour: