FAKING IT: Famous liars on film

More celebrities try to deduce fact from fiction in the panel game Would I Lie To You? (8.30pm, BBC1). Here, we explore film versions of some of history’s best-known fakers…

The mystery surrounding the fate of the children of the last Tsar of Russia inspired many hoaxers, the most famous being Anna Anderson.

Her story is explored in Anastasia

(1956), starring Ingrid Bergman (left). DNA tests in 1994, ten years after Anderson’s death, confirmed that she was not related to the Russian royal family. Outright denial is the first line of defence for many public figures when they are caught out, but US President Richard Nixon’s bare-faced lies about the Watergate scandal led to his resignation in 1974. The two journalists who exposed the story wrote a book, which became the 1976 thriller All The President’s Men, starring

Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford (below). David Hampton was a young man who, in 1980s New York, convinced wealthy Manhattanites – including Melanie Griffith and Calvin Klein – that he was the son of Sidney Poitier. His ruse inspired a stage play, Six Degrees Of Separation, which was made into a 1993 film starring Will Smith. Frenchman Frederic Bourdin was a serial imposter who, in 1997, convinced a Texas family that he was Nicholas Barclay, a boy who went missing in 1994 at the age of 13. Bourdin was found out after he lived with the Barclays for five months, and his outlandish story is told in 2012 documentary The Imposter.