Director James Cameron wrote the character of Jack Dawson entirely from his own imagination, completely unaware that a real man named J.

A closer look

Director James Cameron wrote the character of Jack Dawson entirely from his own imagination, completely unaware that a real man named J. Dawson was actually aboard the Titanic and died when it sank. After the film shattered box office records in 1997, obsessive teenage fans discovered the real Dawson and his grave in Nova Scotia and began flocking to the cemetery in droves. They left behind pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio, movie tickets, and emotional letters, treating the resting place of a random 1912 coal trimmer like a shrine to a fictional romance. It is incredibly bleak and funny that a working-class Irish casualty of a horrific maritime disaster was posthumously hijacked by hormonal moviegoers who just really wanted to mourn a fictional heartthrob who technically could have fit on that floating door