Ambition is a good thing! If we didn’t believe that, this website wouldn’t exist. But success-mania is also a double-edged sword. In J. Edgar, which opens this weekend, Leonardo DiCaprio plays long-time FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, whose drastic overreach and secret investigations tarnished his legacy irrevocably. That got us thinking about people — real and fictional — who became so career-obsessed that it eventually came back to bite them. Beware these cautionary tales of ambition gone wrong.
The Sixth Sense was a critically acclaimed blockbuster and a genuine pleasure to watch. Since then, the filmmaker -- also a terrible writer and worse actor! -- has steadily become one of the most ridiculous figures in Hollywood. He takes himself so seriously that his ambition has made him not an auteur, but a laughingstock.
Shakespeare’s malevolent Scotswoman is possessed by ambition by proxy: She pressures her husband into committing murder, becomes queen, and then feels so guilty she kills herself.
In the classic case of the coverup being worse than the crime, President Nixon was so obsessive about conducting opposition research (and covering up the evidence) that he ended up dooming his own presidency.
Snow White's nemesis (played by Charlize Theron in next year's Snow White and the Huntsman) has a simple ambition: To be the most beautiful woman in the land, forever and ever. We know how that ends up.
Natalie Portman’s ballerina character is so success-obsessed she ends up driving herself crazy with hallucinations and, ultimately, self-harm.
The French military leader was doing a bang-up job of conquering most of continental Europe at the beginning of the early 19th century. But he didn’t know where to stop, and when he tried to take Waterloo, he was resoundingly defeated, then imprisoned and exiled.
Sheen, once the highest-paid actor on television, puffed himself up with such career hubris that he thought America would still embrace him after he lost his mind and went on a bender. Instead, he lost his job, his cool, and his “goddesses.”
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