Meet John Doe (1941) by Frank Capra with Gary Cooper Barbara Stanwyck

The film, about a "grassroots" political campaign, created unwittingly by a newspaper columnist and pursued by a wealthy businessman, became a box office hit and was nominated for an Academy Award for best original story (for Richard Connell and Robert Presnell Sr.).
Plot : Infuriated at being laid off from her job as a newspaper columnist, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) prints a fake letter from the unemployed "John Doe," threatening suicide in protest of society's ills. When the note causes a sensation, the newspaper is forced to rehire Mitchell. Together, the paper and Ann hire John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a former baseball player and tramp, to play John Doe. The Doe philosophy spreads across the country, developing into a political movement, with financial support from the newspaper's publisher, D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold), who plans to channel the support for Doe into support for his own political ambitions...