Kemal Ataturk may have driven the Greek army out of Anatolia after the first World War, but now Greek-Americans have had their revenge by driving Antonio Banderas out of the film in which he was to play the founder of modern Turkey.
Banderas is reported to have withdrawn from the $25 million film following a letter-writing campaign by ethnic Greeks and Armenian-Americans in the US, which feared that Ataturk would be too favourably portrayed.
The withdrawal is a big disappointment to the man behind the film, Tarquin Olivier, son of the actor Sir Laurence Olivier.
He told the New York Times that Banderas "has been very enthusiastic but obviously he was very put off by these letters".
Mr Olivier is still hoping to persuade Banderas to come back to play Ataturk but his agent says that he now wants to devote himself full-time to another project - The Phantom of the Opera.
Mr Olivier now fears that freedom of speech and the arts is being threatened. He says that "our contacts with people in the Greek community here tell us that this campaign only involves a small number of people. It's motivated by a feeling of hatred, not only towards Ataturk but towards Turkey in general".
One letter described Ataturk as "a savage maniac" who was also a "child molester of both sexes, a mass murderer, a destroyer of Greek civilisation and in general a disgrace to human civilisation as we know it".
The reports were accompanied by appeals to readers to send protest letters to Banderas and his wife, actress Melanie Griffith. Mr Olivier said that they might have received as many as 1,000 letters.
A diplomat at the Turkish embassy in Washington told The Irish Times that he was shocked by the news. Mr Namik Tan said that it was "unbelievable" that politics should be dragged into an artistic event. "We are so disappointed and disillusioned at what is a campaign of defamation" of Ataturk, he said.
However, not all Greek-Americans feel the same way. An editorial in a Greek paper published in Long Island says that the campaign has caused many Greeks "to cringe in embarrassment".
"The end result is to make us look like ethnic hysterics, with these groups' objections usually showing up our own chauvinism and narrow-mindedness more than anything else," the editorial says.
Meanwhile, the search goes on for a new screen Ataturk.