- In Arthur Miller's play After the Fall, Maggie has a highly suspicious resemblance to the author's late ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe.
- Alison's House: The posthumous character of Alison Stanhope is a very thinly veiled Emily Dickinson. Playwright Susan Glaspell actually sought to write a play about Dickinson, for the centenary of her birth in 1930. But Dickinson's works and the rights to her story were still under control of the estate at the time, and the surviving Dickinsons refused Glaspell permission to use Emily Dickinson's name or her poetry. Alison and her Real Life counterpart were both shut-ins for years. Both had an easy rapport with the children of the family despite being socially reclusive. Both wrote reams of poetry that weren't published until after they died. Both had sisters that also never married (Dickinson's sister was named Lavinia) and both asked that sister to destroy her unpublished works after her death. And while it is unknown if Emily Dickinson had a forbidden love of the sort that Alison Stanhope had in the backstory, the "Master letters
" have often been interpreted in that way. - The 1950 musical Call Me Madam starred Ethel Merman as Mrs. Sally Adams, America's ambassador to the small Ruritanian country of Lichtenburg (famous for its cheese); this was roughly based on Perle Mesta, Harry Truman's ambassador to Luxembourg. The original program disclaimed that "neither the character of Mrs. Sally Adams nor Miss Ethel Merman resemble[s] any person living or dead," and also played with No Communities Were Harmed by referring to Lichtenburg and the United States of America as "two mythical countries."
- In Cats, the Rum Tum Tugger is styled after Mick Jagger.
- Freddie Trumper, the Jerkass American chess player in Chess, is supposed to be a Bobby Fischer expy, with some characteristics of John McEnroe (whom Freddie refers to as "that tennis player—what's his name"). The Russian player, Anatoly Sergievsky, was initially based on Boris Spassky but the resemblance decreased every time the musical was rewritten.
- Ira Levin's play Critic's Choice has a drama critic married to a playwright, like Walter and Jean Kerr were in Real Life. The title of the caustic magazine article Parker is composing, "Don't Write That Play," is similar to that of Walter Kerr's book How Not to Write a Play, a facetious paragraph from which is this play's acknowledged inspiration.
- In The Doughgirls by Joseph Fields, Sergeant Natalia Chodorov is based on Lyudmila Pavlichenko, though her last name is obviously that of Fields's frequent co-writer, Jerome Chodorov.
- Fangirls: An insanely popular boy band called True Connection whose lead singer is named Harry? Nope, not ringing any bells.
- Finian's Rainbow: It's probably not a coincidence that Woody Mahoney, union organizer, folk singer (whose shame it is that he can't play the guitar he's carrying), and enemy of finance men, has the same first name as Woody Guthrie. (At one point, Woody is supposed to speak "in a 'Talking Union Blues' rhythm.")
- The 2014-2015 British play Great Britain is based around the rise and fall of the News of the World, the British tabloid paper. As such, most of the characters, in particular those working for the Free Press, are very heavily based off the various real-life paper, with a Rupert Murdoch substitute (though his nationality is changed from Australian to Irish with implied links to the NRA), an older version of David Cameron with a different name and various officers in the Metropolitan Police. Notably, however, the knockoff version of Rebekah Brooks is treated in a much more sympathetic light, in no small part due to the fact that she was legally declared innocent by the British courts in real life.
- The musical adaptation of The Great British Bake Off (yes, really) names its two judges as "Pam Lee" and "Phil Hollinghurst", rather than Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood.
- In H.M.S. Pinafore, Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty,note describes his rise in a song emphasizing his complete lack of nautical experience or knowledge.note Audiences quickly made the connection to W.H. Smith,note who was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time and had a background similar to Porter's. As a result, Smith was known for the rest of his life as "Pinafore Smith".
- I Just Stopped By To See The Man by Stephen Jeffreys consists of a meeting between No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of Robert Johnson (if he'd lived until the sixties), Angela Davis, and Jimmy Page.
- In Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the Pharaoh of Egypt is a parody of Elvis Presley.
- Another fictionalized version of Noel Coward is Eric Dare from the little-known Cole Porter musical Jubilee. In the same show, Eva Standing could practically have been a pseudonym for Elsa Maxwell; Charles "Mowgli" Rausmiller, however, is more a parody of Tarzan than of Johnny Weissmuller.
- In The Man Who Came to Dinner, the (speaking) character of Banjo is based on Harpo Marx (his Hollywood co-stars are named as Wacko and Sloppo). Sheridan Whiteside was largely modeled on the Alter-Ego Acting persona of Alexander Woollcott (to whom the play was dedicated by its authors "for reasons that are nobody's business") Lorraine Sheldon represents English actress Gertrude Lawrence, and Beverly Carlton is a thinly veiled pastiche of playwright and wit Noël Coward.
- Of Thee I Sing: Apparently, some reviews of the original production noticed a resemblance between John P. Wintergreen (as played by William Gaxton) and Jimmy Walker, then mayor of New York City (and part-time songwriter), which may have been denied. All but openly acknowledged, though, was that all nine Supreme Court Judges were made up like Oliver Wendell Holmes.
- Although Patience's "fleshly poet", Reginald Bunthorne, is widely thought to represent Oscar Wilde, the actor playing Bunthorne is usually made up to resemble Wilde's fellow wit, the American painter, James Abbott McNeill Whistler of Whistler's Mother fame.note Bunthorne's rival, the "idyllic poet" Archibald Grosvenor, is based on and made up to resemble the English poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, who was born on a street called Grosvenor Place.
- In The Pirates of Penzance, Major-General Stanley was apparently at least in part based on Lieutenant-General (later Field Marshal) Sir Garnet Wolseley. Unlike his fictional counterpart, Sir Garnet was an excellent administrator, good field commander, something of a Renaissance Man, the author of several important works on military history and one of the main driving forces behind the Cardwell Reforms (the least of which was the abolition of flogging as punishment within the Army). Apparently Sir Garnet found the whole thing Actually Pretty Funny and used to sing the associated song to amuse his friends at parties.
- Ethan Kane in Sex with Strangers, who runs the eponymous blog about picking up women in bars, is a thinly veiled version of Tucker Max.
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