Actors have a history with Howard Hughes

Hollywood's fascination with Howard Hughes long antedates "The Aviator," with at least five actors preceding Leonardo DiCaprio in playing the eccentric reclusive billionaire. And that's not counting others, like Warren Beatty and Johnny Depp, who signed to play him in movies that never got produced.

While Hughes was alive, Hughes-based characters had to go by other names. That's why Robert Ryan's sinister, controlling paranoid in "Caught" (1949) has the memorable moniker "Smith Ohlrig." Not that there's any doubt as to his real identity. Oil equipment was the basis of the fortune Hughes inherited. In a choice bit of Hughes lore, legend has it he coached Ryan in how to play the part, which was produced by RKO during the period Hughes owned the studio.

Lean and dark, Ryan bears at least a passing resemblance to Hughes. That's more than can be said for George Peppard's Jonas Cord, in "The Carpetbaggers" (1964). The movie focuses on Hughes's early Hollywood years, before the craziness began to show. Unfortunately, Peppard's Blond Beast looks have more in common with a Hughes Tool oil rig (or ohlrig) than with Hughes.

After Hughes's death, in 1976, there was no need for pseudonyms -- or discretion. The 1977 TV movie "The Amazing Howard Hughes" is based on a tell-all bestseller by Hughes's right-hand man, Noah Dietrich. (John C. Reilly plays him in "The Aviator.") As Hughes, Tommy Lee Jones combines Ryan's dark good looks with Peppard's beefiness and gets to impressively chew the (germ-free) scenery.

In "Melvin and Howard" (1980), Jason Robards is clearly having a grand time. All stringy hair and beard, he plays Hughes as the world's richest hermit on the lam. He's an eccentric in the best Jonathan Demme tradition -- except, of course, that Hughes really existed (though whether he actually ever met Melvin Dummar, his purported heir, is another matter).

Dean Stockwell has a creepy, saturnine grandeur playing Hughes in "Tucker" (1980). His fedora'd gloom is pure antimatter to the sunny boyishness of Jeff Bridges's title character. There are no switchblade-long fingernails or Mormon-guarded manias to be seen, but you can feel the weirdness just waiting to emerge.

MARK FEENEY