After first appearing in the Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon, the 6ft 4ins wrestler went on to gain parts in many blockbuster movies.

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Coming on the heels of The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), in which a financially strapped and roguish outsider tries vainly to find a place in English society, Vanity Fair paints on a much broader canvass and finds the ultimate social climber in the talented, lovely and ever-conniving Becky Sharp.

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In the extremely unlikely event that Bachmann wins the GOP nomination, the result would be a landslide that would make Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964 look small.

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