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Robert Langdon Biography

Fictional Adventurer

Robert Langdon is the popular literary creation of novelist Dan Brown. The star of the books Angels and Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2004) and The Lost Symbol (2009), Langdon is a dashing scholar and professor of religious symbology at Harvard University, whose love of antiquities draws him into myterious and deadly adventures. In Angels and Demons he tangles with a secret society known as the Illuminati, and in The Da Vinci Code he investigates a murder in the Louvre and discovers mysterious clues leading to the Catholic Church, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Langdon was played by actor Tom Hanks in the 2006 film of The Da Vinci Code; his colleague, the French cryptologist Sophie Neveu, was played by Audrey Tautou. Hanks reprised the role in the 2009 film of Angels and Demons, this time with actress Ayelet Zurer as his brainy female sidekick.

Extra credit: In The DaVinci Code, Robert Langdon is described as looking like "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed"... According to Angels and Demons, Langdon was "a varsity diver in prep school and in college"... In real life there is no professorship of religious symbology at Harvard; Brown invented the position for his tales.

Other famous fictional investigators include Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones and Philip Marlowe.