larger than life

More important, impressive, or exciting than the average person or thing. Celebrities are always larger than life to their fans. Have you seen the new stadium? It really seems like it's larger than life when you're inside.

Fig. [of someone] having an aura of greatness, perhaps not supported by the real person. Perry seemed larger than life to those who had only read about him. To the rest of us, he was a boor. To the children, the star athlete who spoke at the school assembly seemed larger than life.

COMMON If you describe someone as larger than life, you mean that they have a very strong personality and behave in a way that makes people notice them. She was larger than life yet intensely human, brilliant yet warm. He's bigger than life, and she's quiet and humble. Note: Larger-than-life is often used before nouns. John Huston was a larger-than-life character, whose temperament was as dramatic as any of the characters in his own films.

Life-size, appearing to be real; on a grand scale. The first expression may be an English version of a much older Latin saying, ad vivum, or “to the life.” It dates from the late eighteenth century, when it appeared in Maria Edgeworth’s Lame Jervas (1799): “I see the puppets, the wheelbarrows, everything as large as life.” In the nineteenth century a number of writers not only used the term but added to it, “and quite as natural.” Among them were Cuthbert Bede (1853), Lewis Carroll (in Through the Looking Glass, 1871), and George Bernard Shaw (1893). A similar addition, essentially meaningless, was “and twice as natural.” The second version, larger than life, conveys the idea of being on a grand or heroic scale. A less alliterative form, big as life, is sometimes used.