One of the most successful forgers in art history is to be immortalised in a film that is being written by a man who was jailed for one of the boldest hoaxes in publishing history, it emerged at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday.

British film-makers have been inspired by the true story of Elmyr de Hory, a master of deception who posed as a flamboyant but impoverished Hungarian aristocrat with an art collection to sell. With two partners in crime, he duped some of the foremost collectors, curators and dealers with his fake Modiglianis, Matisses and Picassos over two decades until he was unmasked in 1967.

Edward Blum, who made Scenes of a Sexual Nature with Ewan McGregor, is directing Fake!, an £8 million film that offers a maze of deception and trickery that extended well into the art establishment.

Blum is now working on the screen-play with De Hory’s friend, the equally notorious Clifford Irving, who was jailed for the audacious 1971 scam in which he claimed to have been asked by the reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes to ghost-write his memoirs. Having sold them to a publisher for a huge advance, he was exposed after Hughes denied that he had even heard of Clifford Irving.

The story of Irving’s deception was brought to the big screen last year in The Hoax, when he was portrayed by Richard Gere. Now the De Hory biography that Irving wrote in the 1960s has inspired a film that will depict a charismatic character who, with his cashmere sweaters, Cartier watches and monocle, looked the part of a Hungarian aristocrat, although, as the son of a tailor, he came from more humble beginnings.

De Hory, who at one time rented a flat in London, turned to crime after failed attempts to sell his own paintings. Such was his talent that he could dash off a “Matisse” sketch in the time it took him to smoke a cigarette. It is said that the French master Derain even authenticated a De Hory “Derain” as his own.

Two Paris dealers, Fernand Legros and Real Lessard, got rich on his fakes and travelled the world selling his pictures. De Hory, meanwhile, rarely saw the promised monthly “salary”. Their business came to an abrupt end after a series of violent arguments led to Legros reporting Lessard to the police in Paris. In 1976, threatened with extradition and imprisonment, De Hory took his own life – although some claim that even his death was faked.

Blum said: “Perhaps De Hory was having the last laugh. Faking his own suicide would be the ultimate conclusion to a life based on doing fakes.

“The story of Fake! is beyond the normal scope of the imagination, and for that reason it has to be based on a true story. De Hory painted over £500 million worth of fake PostImpressionist art. Only a small fraction of that has ever been recovered. When you look at a Picasso or a Matisse in a museum, who knows whether it’s real.”

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