The role of president has been portrayed many different ways in Hollywood and INSIDE EDITION takes a look at the Commander in Chief on the big and small screen.
Harrison Ford in the thriller Air Force One disposed of terrorist hijackers with his bare hands.
The heroic image was mirrored by Bill Pullman in the movie Independence Day as the Leader of the Free World actually hopped aboard a fighter jet to battle an alien invasion.
But, when aliens invaded planet earth in Mars Attacks, the Commander-in-Chief played by Jack Nicholson, wasn't exactly a profile in courage.
They don't come much goofier than the one portrayed by Peter Sellers in the Cold War classic Dr. Strangelove, when he informed the Russian president that his nation was about to be nuked.
We hate it when a giant meteor crashes into the Atlantic and wreaks havoc on the World, as it did in the film Deep Impact. But as the president of the United States, Morgan Freeman is both brave, and bold.
Geena Davis proved that a woman can handle the oval office just as well as a man in the ABC drama Commander In Chief.
In The American President, Michael Douglas shows that the president is flesh and blood like everybody else as he embarks upon an awkward romance with Annette Bening.
In the TV series The West Wing, Martin Sheen was a soulful and sympathetic president. But, in the film, The Dead Zone, he's portrayed as a lunatic who shields himself from an assassin's bullets by holding up a baby, and he's bent on destroying the world.
All these presidents are fictitious characters, but now, Daniel Day-Lewis is portraying a real-life president in the forthcoming Steven Spielberg film Lincoln, the man considered by many to be our greatest president of all.
