Poor Tori Spelling. Not a sentence you see very often, whichever of the senses of the adjective is being used, but today it might be almost apt. Her late father - Aaron Spelling, creator and producer of series such as Dynasty, Starsky and Hutch, Beverly Hills 90210 and, therefore, Quite A Rich Man - has left his actress/socialite/model daughter just £100,000 of his £270m fortune, instead of the £100m an earlier version of the will had led her to expect would be coming her way. Adding insult to injury, he left £30,000 to his home decorator and a full £15,000 to his widow's manicurist. Nothing says "That'll teach you to fall out with me nine months before my death" like leaving half as much as your daughter's legacy to a peripheral member of staff and the woman who pushes back her mother's cuticles, but we should expect no less of a stylish gesture from the man who gave us the glorious Alexis Krystle catfight that ended in shredded shoulder pads and the Carrington swimming pool, one of the televisual high points of the 80s. Still, at least it's not quite as pointed as the terms of one Sara Clarke, late of Bournemouth, whose will read: "To my daughter, I leave £1 - for the kindness and love she has never shown me."

Last wills and testaments have long been a tempting way of ensuring that a simmering resentment or prejudice survives beyond the grave. When a Mr Henry Budd died in 1862, he left the then almost Spellingesque sum of £200,000 in trust for his two sons on condition that neither ever grew a moustache. A few years later, Matthias Flemming followed a similar route by leaving his clean-shaven employees £10 each. Moustachioed equivalents, however, had to make do with a fiver.

A more sweeping objection was exercised by an Iowa lawyer, TM Zink, in 1930. He left $50,000 in trust for 75 years for the eventual foundation of the Zink Womanless Library. Signs saying "No Women Admitted" were to be posted at each entrance and no books, works of art or decorations by women were to sully the premises or its environs. He graciously proffered a full and frank explanation for the decision in his will. "My intense hatred of women is not of recent origin or development nor based upon any personal differences I ever had with them but is the result of my experiences with women, observations of them and study of all literatures and philosophical works." Alas, his family successfully challenged his post-mortem plans and the Zink monument to misogyny was never built.

But family feuds and marital disharmony give rise to the bloodiest testamentary revenges. There is the fabled army of old ladies who leave their entire estates to local cats' homes rather than let it pass to ungrateful offspring who never visit unless it is to mark choice items with their initials and delivery address. Mary Murphy, a Californian widow who died in 1979, put an interesting twist on this old favourite by leaving the bulk of her $200,000 estate to an animal shelter but also stipulating the immediate destruction of her collie Sido. A judge reprieved him.

One barrister of my acquaintance, whom we shall call Sarah to protect the innocent and the sub judice, recalls an elderly Polish client who was more of a Pope lover than pet lover and left all her money to John Paul II. "When he died a few days after her, all her family came out of the woodwork and started arguing with the Catholic church about where the money should go next."

Part of the problem, according to Mark Keenan, a solicitor dealing with contentious wills at the specialist law firm Mishcon de Reya, is "the general misconception that you can leave your worldly goods to whomever you like, whether that happens to be your spouse or the cat, but that's not true. The 1975 Inheritance Act gives certain categories of claimants (including spouses, partners, children and mistresses) rights to challenge a will. This is probably how Tori would attack her father's will if they were English."

If you feel a testator has done you wrong, you can try claiming the will is invalid. "You can allege that the formalities weren't followed, or there was some form of undue influence, that they didn't know or approve of its contents or that they lacked testamentary capacity," says Keenan, which can be loosely translated as - you can try your luck at saying it's written in the wrong ink or something, that a dodgy carer stood over granny with a pair of scissors poised above her drip feed, that they signed the thing without reading it or that they were bonkers at the time they drew it up.

Or, if you are, say, the family of an oil billionaire like Howard Marshall who has recently married a pneumatic but expensive individual like Anna Nicole Smith, all of the above.

While it is the existence of mistresses that frequently causes disputes after the will is read, it is marriage that prompts the most vindictive legacies. At the end of the 17th century, the Earl of Stafford made the following bequest: "To the worst of women, Claude Charlotte de Grammont, unfortunately my wife, guilty as she is of all crimes, I leave five-and-forty brass halfpence, which will buy a pullet for her supper. A better gift than her father can make her; for I have known when having not the money, neither had he the credit for such a purchase; he being the worst of men, and his wife the worst of women in all debaucheries. Had I known their characters I had never married their daughter, and made myself unhappy." Not much room for legalistic manoeuvre there.

Nowadays, lawyers try to persuade their clients to siphon their vitriol off into a side letter rather than putting it into the will itself, as the latter will in due course become a public document while the letter can remain private. But they do not always succeed, as one barrister (who wishes to remain anonymous) recalls. "I had one client, a fireman, who just wrote "To the perfetic [pathetic] woman what was once my wife I leave the sum of 1p which she can shove up her arse." So cheer up, Tori, things could be worse. And a lot more painful.

· Research by Meghan Graham.