In Anne Rice's book Interview with the Vampire and the overall series, The Vampire Chronicles, the main character is Lestat de Lioncourt who in the beginning of the series seems to be the character that is a selfish jerk who only thinks of himself and is killed twice and mysteriously doesn't die. Although he's a vampire, according to common lore, vampires should die when confronted with flames and having their throats cut. Mysteriously, Lestat doesn't.
However, with this character, I find it incredibly interesting with the similarities between Anne Rice's Lestat character and William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Besides the small fact that they are both misspelled names (Hamlet was supposed to be named for Shakespeare's son and Lestat was supposed to be Lestan for Anne's late husband), but just their general characterizing. Lestat isn't exactly afraid to act on what he wants to like Hamlet, but he does become sort of a tragic hero as Hamlet was. One must read the series to see how exactly Lestat becomes this hero, but it is there (no spoilers up in here).
One other fun fact with these similarities is that when Lestat gets killed for the second time, the girl that slashes his throat says the line that Horatio says in the play, "good night sweet prince,/ and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest," which resonates with the other similarities within the play and the book. Lestat doesn't quite have a purpose as he kills which is opposite of Hamlet, but I suppose that the basic question is is if Rice purposely put all of this into the novel because of the similarities or if they just so happened to occur.
I believe it wasn't on purpose in Interview, but in The Vampire Lestat, we learn that Lestat did act in a theater in Paris, so perhaps she noticed the similarities and used it in his character development further down the road, including a small insanity stint.
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