There is little friction or passion here, and Mr. Hanks's Mike, with his professional persona set aside, registers as just a regular Joe with worries that furrow his brow.
Barack Obama's campaign and his persona set very lofty expectations for his presidency in both in the U.S. and across the world.
But there was a singular irony to the Velvet Revolution: none of its dramatis personae set out with an overt political agenda.
Mr. Parker sought to correct the imbalance between his private and public persona by setting up a Twitter account.
Having killed the Cat Stevens persona, Mr. Islam set a torch to his memory.
It's notable that one of the most radical eccentrics of modern rap – Lil B, who raps over ambient music, tours as a positive-thinking guru, and along with Soulja Boy pioneered the kind of nonsensical persona that set the stage for the likes of Young Thug – emerged from a Californian skater-boho milieu.
There, bringing the director out from backstage and setting his persona alongside his oeuvre, the young auteurists foresaw the coming state of the cinema, and, for that matter, of life: the convergence of art and artist, of creation and media performance.
But the recent decision by the game's owner, Electronic Arts, to terminate Mr. Ludlow's account -- forever erasing his simulated Sims persona -- has set off a debate over free expression and ethical behavior in online worlds that is reverberating in the real one.
Mr. Nicholson's seductively confrontational persona had been set with "Easy Rider" in 1969 and further refined the next year by the famous scene in "Five Easy Pieces" in which the waitress in the diner won't serve him toast so he demands a chicken salad sandwich -- without the chicken salad.
But it also owed something to Mr. Evans's almost preternatural graciousness, smoothness and air of quiet authority, a confidence-winning persona that sometimes sets friends to wondering how it is that Mr. Bush, and not Mr. Evans, wound up scaling the pinnacles of politics.
