From <i>Rocky</i> to <i>A Star Is Born</i> – the legendary movie leads who had greatness thrust upon them.

The story of the poor, unheralded hero or heroine who ends up on top of the world is as old as the Old Testament itself. From Moses washing up in a basket on the banks of the Nile to Cinderella sliding on the glass slipper, to Pip – protagonist of Mr Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations – learning the dreadful truth about his fortune, there are two sides to the rags-to-riches story: on one hand, we all want to imagine we might one day come into unexpected wealth and success. On the other, we want to know that wealth and success is not what’s ultimately going to bring us contentment – and that, as in some of the films below, having it might turn out to be worse than not.

A story so great, they made it four times. With Mr Bradley Cooper’s Oscar-tipped remake of A Star Is Born on the big screen now, it’s worth revisiting the previous three versions of the Hollywood classic about a washed-up, booze-addled entertainer who discovers a glorious new talent, and who then has to face the prospect of her fame eclipsing his own.

The original 1937 movie starred Ms Janet Gaynor and Mr Fredric March as actors, as did the most celebrated, so far, of the subsequent remakes, 1954’s A Star Is Born, starring Ms Judy Garland and Mr James Mason. For the 1976 adaptation starring Ms Barbra Streisand and Mr Kris Kristofferson, the action was moved to the music industry, which is where it remains for Mr Cooper’s coupling with Lady Gaga.

A doomed romance and cautionary showbiz tale, A Star Is Born is also a supreme example of the rags-to-riches narrative, which has reliably captivated audiences across genres as disparate as comedies, cartoons, crime movies, sports movies and musicals.

The greatest rags-to-riches movie of all time might also be the greatest movie of all time. Mr Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece chronicles the irresistible rise of Charles Foster Kane from dirt-poor kid to world-bestriding media colossus. Mr Welles based the character on the era’s dominant newspaper magnates, men such as Mr William Randolph Hearst – though Mr Hearst, unlike Kane, was born into money, and probably a lot less conflicted about it than Kane.

As he expires in bed at his preposterous hilltop mansion Xanadu, Kane utters the single word, “Rosebud”. A journalist spends the rest of the movie in search of its meaning, but he never uncovers what the audience learns in the final reel: that Rosebud was the name of the toboggan that Kane was riding on the day he was plucked from his childhood home in Colorado and set on a path to riches. So perhaps he preferred the rags all along?

Messrs Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s classic musical isn’t the only screen reworking of Mr George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (see Pretty Woman, below), but it might just be the most charming. Ms Audrey Hepburn is irresistible as Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower-seller from Edwardian Covent Garden who transforms into an upper-class ringer with the help of phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Mr Rex Harrison), with whom she ultimately falls in love – perhaps against her better judgement.

The original 1956 Broadway production of My Fair Lady featured a then-unknown Ms Julie Andrews in the lead role. When he produced the film, Mr Jack Warner insisted on a more famous star; he cast Ms Hepburn and had her singing parts dubbed (uncredited) by Ms Marni Nixon. Ms Andrews had the last laugh, though: at the 1965 Oscars, My Fair Lady won eight awards including Best Picture, but Ms Andrews beat Ms Hepburn to the Best Actress gong for her performance in Mary Poppins.

There’s something of an overlap between sports movies and rags-to-riches stories, since both so often involve audiences rooting for an underdog. And is there any underdog more iconic than Mr Sylvester Stallone’s Philadelphia southpaw? Rocky Balboa’s career prospects are strictly small-time until the world’s top heavyweight unexpectedly offers him a shot at the title, and a chance to get his life back on the rails.

Rocky gave Mr Stallone his own rags-to-riches narrative: the struggling young actor supposedly wrote the script for the movie in a little under four days after seeing the unfancied Mr Chuck Wepner fight Mr Muhammad Ali all the way to a fifteenth round. When United Artists suggested a selection of established stars for the title role – Messrs Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Ryan O’Neal – Mr Stallone insisted the part was his. He won the argument, and Rocky went on to win three Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

“Say hello to my little friend…” Scarface is the rags-to-riches story on steroids – or, more accurately, cocaine – with Cuban gangster Tony Montana (Mr Al Pacino) going from refugee to kingpin in a mere three years. That meteoric rise ends with an explosion as Tony kills his best friend, gets shot by his sister, snorts a mountain of coke and fires a rocket launcher at an army of rival thugs before at last being gunned down in the grand lobby of his Miami mansion.

The ultraviolent melodrama was a remake of a 1932 crime film, rewritten for Mr Pacino by Mr Oliver Stone, who moved to Paris to break his own cocaine habit so he could think clearly enough to produce a script. While critics in 1983 were queasy about its graphic brutality, bad language and depiction of drug-taking, the film has come to be considered a classic in its own right.

Trading Places isn’t just rags-to-riches, it’s also riches-to-rags. The Mr John Landis comedy features two of the era’s finest comic actors at the peak of their powers: Mr Eddie Murphy as street hustler Billy Ray Valentine, and Mr Dan Ackroyd as entitled financier Louis Winthorpe III.

Valentine and Winthorpe both become pawns in a game being played by the latter’s bosses, the Duke brothers, who run an experiment in the relative power of nature and nurture by disgracing Winthorpe and elevating Valentine to take Winthorpe’s former position. In the end, the two of them join forces to topple the Dukes and take their fortune.

Like My Fair Lady, Trading Places shares its DNA with earlier canonical works such as Mr Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper and Mr Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Marriage Of Figaro, both of which involve characters from opposite ends of the social spectrum switching roles.

The original script for the movie that eventually became Pretty Woman would struggle to squeeze into the category of rags-to-riches. A gritty drama about Los Angeles sex workers, its lead character Vivian was addicted to cocaine, a habit that her wealthy patron/john Edward urged her to quit, only for the film to end with her back at the kerbside.

It was Disney studio chief Mr Jeffrey Katzenberg who ordered the rewrite that turned Vivian and Edward’s unlikely love story into a romantic comedy. It’s hard to imagine a studio making a light-hearted romance about a sex worker nowadays, but the film eventually turned the romcom into Hollywood’s hottest genre, and Ms Julia Roberts into its biggest star.

A relative unknown at the time, Ms Roberts won the role after several major names had already turned it down, including Mses Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer, Molly Ringwald and Daryl Hannah.

Another rags-to-riches fairytale that came from nowhere to claim the Oscar for Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire was based on the 2005 novel Q & A, by Mr Vikas Swarup. It tells the story of Jamal Malik, a desperately poor kid from Mumbai’s Dharavi slum – the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks – who literally climbs out of the sewer and ends up an unlikely contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Jamal, played by the film’s breakout star Mr Dev Patel, isn’t on television to win the prize money; he’s there to win back his lost love. But in the end, of course, he wins them both.

The rags-to-riches narrative isn’t just a Hollywood favourite: it also resonates in India, and director Mr Danny Boyle said he was influenced by similar uplifting stories that had come out of Bollywood in previous decades. So perhaps it should be no surprise that the 2013 Bollywood hit Aashiqui 2 was in fact a Hindi remake of, yes, A Star Is Born.

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