Elmyr de Hory (born 'Hoffmann Elemér') (1906 – December 11, 1976) was a famous Hungarian-born painter and art forger. He claimed to have sold over a thousand forgeries to reputable art galleries all over the world. His forgeries garnered much celebrity from a Clifford Irving book and from F for Fake, a documentary of sorts by Orson Welles, making his works popular in their own right.
Most of the information regarding de Hory's early life comes from what he told American writer Clifford Irving, who wrote the first biography about him. Since Elmyr's success was reliant upon his skills of deception and invention, it would be difficult to take the facts that he told about his own life at face value, as Clifford Irving himself admitted. Elmyr claimed that he was born into an aristocratic family, that his father was an Austro-Hungarian ambassador and that his mother came from a family of bankers. However, subsequent investigation has suggested that Elmyr's childhood was, more likely, of an ordinary, middle class variety. His parents left him to the care of various governesses and were divorced when Elmyr was sixteen.
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