"If you create this comedy character of wealth and opulence swanning around, people hate you, " he told The Independent in 2010.

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One proved that women and men would flock to a broad character comedy about women while the other proved that a genre film seen almost exclusively by female audiences could still pull in blockbuster numbers.

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It holds strong to the idea that an empathetic and less than winning hero is the best sort of character for a comedy.

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Gilliam, of course, has a wild visual imagination and an exuberant sense of character, but the comedy is so frenetic it quickly cancels itself out.

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"I knew Zooey's music from Elf, " recalls Ward, referring to the songs her shop-clerk character sang in the Christmas comedy starring Will Ferrell.

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Sea Axe Damen shipyardsIn the Christopher Guest-directed comedy, Best in Show, one character is continuously approached by men she once slept with.

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In 1997 Thornton joined the cast of the long running comedy series Last of the Summer Wine, as the character Herbert "Truly" Truelove.

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The recent romantic comedy "He's Just Not That Into You" had a character, Mary (Drew Barrymore), who boasts to a trio of colleagues that a potential paramour "Myspaced me, " meaning that he contacted her via the social network Myspace.

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We see action, romance, comedy, revenge, damnable villains, and a heroic (though complicated) central character.

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