Barry Lyndon sights on Thackeray's 1844 "satirical picaresque about the fortune-hunting of an Irish rogue," "Barry Lyndon", the setting of which allowed Kubrick to take advantage of the copious period research he had done for the now-aborted "Napoleon". At the time, Kubrick merely announced that his next film would star Ryan O'Neal (deemed "a seemingly un-Kubricky choice of leading man") and Marisa Berenson, a former "Vogue" and "Time" magazine cover model, and be shot largely in Ireland. So heightened was the secrecy surrounding the film that "Even Berenson, when Kubrick first approached her, was told only that it was to be an
Title role character need not be the subject of the whole title in a strict grammatical sense: Uncle Tom is the title character of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Lee Marvin is often described as playing the title character in the film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", as his character (Liberty Valance) is named in the title, even though the subject of the title is the person who shot him. A title character may be the main antagonist, e.g. Sauron in "The Lord of the Rings" or Bram Stoker's "Dracula". In "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", the wizard is the title character,