Does a person own the copyright on themselves? The actor Scarlett Johansson would like to think so. She is suing the French author Grégoire Delacourt because he has written a novel whose central character looks just like her. The protagonist of La Première Chose qu'On Regarde (The First Thing We Look At) is a model called Janine Foucamprez whose life is shaped by her physical resemblance to Johansson. Janine finds that she is able to masquerade as the Hollywood star, though eventually she gets found out and comes to a sad end. Delacourt has described his book as "a homage to feminine beauty", but Johansson's lawyer, Vincent Toledano, is having none of this Gallic flattery. Demanding €50,000 (£41,000) in damages, he has said that the novel is a "violation and fraudulent and illegal exploitation of her name, her reputation and her image". Toledano is all in favour of artistic freedom, apparently, but is impelled to act against the novelist because he has written from "purely mercantile ends".
For a US lawyer to deplore the profit motive indicates some lack of self-awareness, but what of the actor herself? Has she had the same sense-of-humour bypass? Has she read any of the novel (which has not yet been translated into English)? Or does brand protection make the reading of the novel irrelevant? She is not the first person to find herself put in a novel (though the lovely irony is that she isn't actually in this novel at all). Wiser celebrities than her have chosen to ignore or be flattered by their fictionalisation. Indeed, if novelists had foreseen the possibility of legal action such as this, perhaps the history of fiction would have been rather different.
For novels have always been full of real people, and not just in supporting roles. Often dead people – Don DeLillo's Libra takes us into the mind of John F Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald; the protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde is Marilyn Monroe. You can find almost every great name from history in a novel. But it is also not uncommon to encounter a character brought alive in a novel while still, in fact, alive.
It happens to politicians, who have to be less delicate than Hollywood actors. Margaret Thatcher was alive (and brand-sensitive, no doubt) when she made a grand appearance at a party in Alan Hollinghurst's Booker prize-winning The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst's protagonist, Nick Guest, elevated by the cocaine he has snorted in his landlord's lavatory, finds the Iron Lady "fairly sozzled" on a sofa and asks her to dance. Her Tory courtiers watch in envious horror as she cavorts "rather sexily" with our gay hero to the Rolling Stones' Get Off of My Cloud. The strong whiff of booze apart, you might think the episode not bad for her image. Nick himself is rather taken with her.
A later prime minister, Tony Blair, features in an entirely unflattering cameo in Ian McEwan's Saturday. Neurosurgeon Henry Perowne attends the opening of the Tate Modern and bumps into Blair in one of the galleries. The prime minister grasps Perowne's hand and tells him how much he admires the work he is doing. "In fact, we've got two of your paintings hanging in Downing Street. Cherie and I adore them." McEwan has confirmed that this is a record of his own meeting with Blair; it is not quite clear whether this makes it more or less mocking. You cannot imagine these politicians turning a hair – though when he drew on his inside knowledge of the Blair government for his satirical portrait of a slavishly pro-American British PM in The Ghost, Robert Harris confessed to a flicker of anxiety. "The day this appears, a writ might come through the door. But I would doubt it, knowing him."
Members of the royal family are regularly fictionalised but, happily, are bound not to respond. Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader has our monarch struggling to understand the novels she finds in a mobile library parked outside Buckingham Palace. Sue Townsend's The Queen and I sends Elizabeth Windsor to live on a council estate. Princess Margaret was still going strong when she became a memorably ghastly character in Edward St Aubyn's Some Hope. She is the guest of honour at a gruesome country house lunch party, at which she sourly scorns every diner and ritually humiliates the French ambassador.
The use of a real person can be a kind of flattery, and perhaps – if only Johansson would take note – best treated as such by the subject. In McEwan's most recent novel, Sweet Tooth, there are supporting roles for his own first publisher, Tom Maschler, and his friend and fellow novelist Martin Amis. Both of them perform rather impressively. When Helen Fielding produced Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary, she introduced her stumbling heroine to the real Colin Firth, the encounter being a logical extension of her imitation of Pride and Prejudice. When Firth duly popped up as Mark Darcy in the film version of the first novel, the circle of mutual admiration was closed. It is a comic version of Delacourt's seemingly more earnest exploration of the cult of film star allure.
True, Johansson is not the first person to have gone to law over their appearance in novels. David Peace's The Damned United does not just feature the football manager Brian Clough – it takes place in his head, in an extraordinary inner voice that Peace invents for him. The Leeds United midfielder Johnny Giles is shown scheming to make sure that Clough loses his job at Leeds – though the novelist can say that this is all seen through the fiction al Clough's eyes. The real Johnny Giles clearly had little time for such literary critical niceties. He issued proceedings against Peace and his publisher, Faber and Faber, who agreed to make changes to future editions of the book.
The few legal cases that have taken place have involved living people claiming that they have been exploited or traduced in fiction. Death seems to make a person fair game. Reading Muriel Spark's brilliant Aiding and Abetting, in which a comically mediocre Lord Lucan encounters his devilish double, one wondered if it might be just enough to flush out the reclusive baronet. The bare-faced cheek of it. But perhaps if Johansson succeeds, the dead will rise again. There are surely any number of descendants who could claim that a reputation has been misused for the financial benefit of a novelist.
But usually real people are put in novels under an invented name. It is an old trick. The most memorable comic character in Charles Dickens's Bleak House is the mild-mannered scrounger and disarming hypocrite Harold Skimpole, who exploits others while professing his unworldliness. Critics in the know recognised him immediately as the essayist and editor Leigh Hunt, once the intimate of Shelley and Keats, now aging but indubitably alive. Privately, Dickens confirmed the identification: "I suppose he is the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words ... an absolute reproduction of a real man."
If you recognise the character, you are confirming the truthfulness of the characterisation. A hugely successful example was the roman à clef Primary Colours "by Anonymous" (eventually unmasked as the political journalist Joe Klein). The central character, a Democrat contender for the presidency called Jack Stanton – with boundless charm and a record of adulterous liaisons – is clearly Bill Clinton. His steely wife, Susan, is Hillary. And so on. The novel looks as if it is an inside account of the Clintons' ruthless (and successful) attempts to limit reputational damage and conceal their marital discord. But it is unofficially a compliment too, for the narrator, a young political adviser, cannot help succumbing to Stanton's charms. Rather like Arthur Dreyfuss, the young mechanic who at the beginning of Delacourt's novel is smitten by a vision in the doorway of his workshop: "Devant lui se tenait Scarlett Johansson … " ('In front of him stood Scarlett Johansson').
In comic fiction, the trick of pretending to disguise a real person beneath a fictional name also often seems a compliment to the vivid character of the person intended. In David Lodge's campus novels Changing Places and Small World, the turbo-charged American literary professor Morris Zapp was recognisable to all members of his profession as Stanley Fish (the real name somehow more improbable than the fictional one). Fish purveyed literary theory to wowed students and awed British academics in the 1970s and 80s, and Lodge's novel helped to cement his intellectual celebrity. Like Michael Heseltine keeping framed satirical cartoons of himself on his walls, Fish recognised that the fictionalisation did nothing but good for his international standing.
The identification of Zapp as Fish was available to a minority of readers, and not essential to the enjoyment of the novel. Similarly, but more sombrely, you do not have to identify Maria Tambini, the protagonist of Andrew O'Hagan's Personality, as the young singer Lena Zavaroni, who became famous when she won Opportunity Knocks aged 13. Some of the facts of their biographies are identical, but a few are not. A prefatory note to the reader says that the novel "bears a relation to the lives of several dead performers". As if making a virtue out of tactful concealment, the novelist invites us to find parallels, but will not confirm them.
Those "real people" who are most commonly made to suffer by their appearance in novels are surely the least famous, and the least able to defend themselves – the once nearest and erstwhile dearest of those novelists who have always raided their private lives for the stuff of their fiction. In McEwan's Sweet Tooth, the protagonist, Serena, has an affair with a novelist and cannot "banish the thought that he was quietly recording our lovemaking for future use, that he was making mental notes". The novel suggests that it is a wise worry. Some novelists seem to operate in just this way. The great American novelist Saul Bellow married five times and divorced four: each of his marital breakdowns seems to have provided the material for one or other of his novels, and not one of the portraits from life could be said to be magnanimous.
The list of non-celebrities hurt by finding themselves in novels must be a very long one, but they have not had brands to defend. No doubt many a novelist's mind is, as Philip Roth – who himself has filled his novels with real people, famous and not – puts it, "a great opportunistic maw". Novelists are opportunistic creatures, and perhaps we should be a little suspicious of Delacourt's response to the communications from Johansson's lawyer: "I thought she might send me flowers, as it was a declaration of love for her, but she didn't understand." In the copious acknowledgements to the novel, he does offer her a better role than that of a litigant. He thanks, along with his wife and family, "la muse qui se reconnaîtra" – the muse, who will recognise herself. The actor has acted many parts; what could be better than that of a muse?
