Langley hopes the physical evidence found so far will be enough to make people rethink their image of Richard III as a caricature villain.

"It disproves the Tudor writers who claimed terrible things about him: That he was hunchbacked, that he was two years in the womb, that he was born with hair and teeth," she says.

"Instead we can see that he was a strong, capable man, and it blows all those misconceptions away. It gives us so much information about Richard, the real Richard, before the Tudor writers got to him.

"I'm not looking for a saint, but a real man -- if I've got to portray him on a big screen I want to show the real him. He wasn't always great and good, but that's fine, if he was, we'd all be bored to death."

She has even been in talks with Leicestershire lad turned Hollywood hero Richard Armitage -- last seen as Thorin Oakenshield in "The Hobbit" -- to play the king.

"He was born to play the role," she explains. "He's an amazing doppelganger for Richard III, he was born a couple of miles from Bosworth on the anniversary of Richard's death, and he was even named after him."

The film won't be the first attempt to rehabilitate Richard III in the eyes of the general public - mystery writer Josephine Tey tried it in the 1950s with "The Daughter of Time," in which her detective hero "discovers" the truth about the much-maligned monarch.

It was this book which first sparked the curiosity of Michael Ibsen, prompting him to rethink the image he had grown up with, of Richard III as "this evil figure who killed the Princes in the Tower."

Now the Canadian-born cabinetmaker finds himself at the heart of the story, with a role he could never have imagined when he read Tey's novel 20 years ago: The potential DNA match for a long-dead king of England.

"Of course, I'd rather be related to a benign king figure than a brutal murderer, so it's hard not to be biased, but some of the history is so vitriolic, I'm a little suspicious -- can he really have been that bad?"

Historian John Ashdown Hill tracked down Ibsen's British-born mother Joy in 2004.

"She knew she had an illustrious family background - they were from the upper class, but had fallen on hard times -- but she had no idea that this was in her past," Ibsen says.

Ashdown Hill explained that as a direct - if long-distant -- female relative of Richard III's sister, Anne of York, she and her children should have the same mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) as Richard III.

Joy was skeptical at first, and in any case, as Ibsen points out "it seemed fairly academic at the time, we didn't get too excited."

Sadly, Ibsen's mother died before the Leicester dig could take place, but he was there in her place as work began, offering up that all important DNA sample.

"My brother and sister and I all inherited the same mtDNA, but my sister is the only one who can pass it on, and she has no children, so they caught us just in time," he told CNN, reflecting on the "surreal experience" of the past few months.

That DNA now has "the potential to change history," according to Lin Foxhall, professor of archaeology at the University of Leicester.

"It depends how much DNA we are able to extract," says Turi King, the scientist carrying out those all-important tests. "The more we get, the more specific we can be."

"If enough DNA is collected, we might even be able to tell hair color, eye color," says Foxhall, adding that this, together with facial reconstruction would be an "interesting test. since we have portraits of Richard III, but like written histories, they too can be biased and polemical."

Ashdown Hill, who has spent more than 10 years investigating the story of Richard III, is at pains to point out that the key piece of evidence he helped track down may not be the be-all and end-all of the story.

"DNA is important, but it's not the only thing, and even if it does match, there will always be some people who say 'It's not him,'" he says. "There's no label on the bones, and there's no-one alive who can say 'I knew him, that's him.'"

"It's always going to be a leap of faith. All we can do is stack up as much evidence as we can, so that leap is as small as possible, but in the end, there has to be an element of belief."

Yet for him, the question was answered in a "very strange moment" at the end of that long day last August.

"A white van was brought into the car park to take the remains away, and I was asked to carry the box to the van," he says. "I had all sorts of thoughts going through my head: This was Richard III, I had been looking for him for so long, and there I was, as close to him as it is possible to be."