This article is from the archive of our partner .
I began this morning as I begin lots of mornings, Googling "John Corbett" and looking at his Wikipedia page to remind myself of all the wonderful facts about his life and career. I also noticed, perhaps for the first time, that in his profile picture he was sporting a jaunty pair of sunglasses that I'm sure my mother owned at one time or another in her life. Because Wikipedia only allows public domain pictures with the most-relaxed Creative Commons licenses, it can make for a very limited selection for even the most famous celebrities' pages. But it's led to a wonderful sub-genre of internet nonsense: terrible, unflattering, or just plain confusing Wiki-imagery. For most public figures, this is the web page about them that people will look at the most, and this is the face they have to present to the world. Below, some of my personal favorites.
You know Jean Reno as the ice-cold French action star who featured in such films as The Professional, Mission: Impossible and Ronin. Here, he looks like a harried academic who just got off an 18-hour flight after attending a three-day conference on applied microsciences and was just told that the car service he arranged to pick him up forgot about the appointment.
Elijah Wood played jocular Hobbit Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings films, but off-screen he is much more of a pale, cave-dwelling Gollum type. It is unclear whether his Wikipedia picture is devoted to a non-emerging fashion trend that encourages people to inexplicably fasten their top buttons, to give their neck a "weakly strangled" look.