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In recent days, the actor Mandy Patinkin, who played the master swordsman Inigo Montoya in the classic 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” has received emails from friends alerting him to pictures on the Internet that show scenes taken from the movie with Ted Cruz’s face superimposed on top of his body.

“They Photoshopped his face right over my face!” Mr. Patinkin said last week when reached by phone at his home in New York’s Hudson Valley. “I said, ‘How can I stop this?’”

Mr. Cruz, the Texas senator who, according to polls, is now leading the Republican presidential field in Iowa, has long listed “The Princess Bride” as his favorite movie. As a Princeton undergraduate, he watched the movie repeatedly with his friends on the debate team and memorized a good chunk of the lines.

In the last few weeks, Mr. Cruz, who dabbled, at times disastrously, in acting at Harvard Law School, has started reciting the lines on the campaign trail, including at an Iowa Central Community College event, where he performed a version of Mr. Patinkin’s catchphrase in the movie: “Allo, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

As Mr. Patinkin’s inbox became cluttered with videos of Mr. Cruz acting out scenes that he, Carol Kane and Billy Crystal had made famous (“He’s doing all of Billy’s lines!” Mr. Patinkin said), the actor began wondering how much of the movie Mr. Cruz really understood.

“I would like to be with Senator Cruz for a moment and I would like to respectfully ask him, since he quotes all the lines from ‘The Princess Bride’ and certainly all of my character, Inigo Montoya’s, lines, I would like to know why he doesn’t quote my favorite line?” That line, Mr. Patinkin said, was among the last his character utters in a movie that essentially taught that love conquers all.

But first, some plot for the uninitiated: While working in the service of Vizzini, a comically arrogant criminal mastermind played by Wallace Shawn, Inigo is bested by the movie’s hero, the mysterious Man in Black.

Soon after, Inigo and his fellow hired hand, played by Andre the Giant, join the Man in Black in his noble mission to rescue his true love, played by the “House of Cards” star Robin Wright, who has been forcibly engaged to the evil prince Humperdinck, who plans to strangle her on their wedding night. But Inigo’s true motive is to avenge the death of his father, slain decades earlier, by Humperdinck’s sadistic six-fingered lieutenant. He does so in the climactic rescue scene at the end of the movie, in which he magically overcomes mortal wounds to win a duel to the death.

“After the princess flies out the window and falls into Andre the Giant’s arms,” Mr. Patinkin said, “Inigo says to the Man in Black, ‘I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.’”

Mr. Cruz, in Mr. Patinkin’s heavily left-leaning worldview, is trafficking in the revenge business, appealing to anxious voters by saying of the Islamic State, “We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion,” and by exploiting fears about immigrants and Muslims.

“Senator Cruz, if you’re going to say those lines, you’ve got to say the other line, too,” Mr. Patinkin said.

Sounding increasingly vexed, he added: “This man is not putting forth ideas that are at the heart of what that movie is all about. I would love for Senator Cruz, and everyone creating fear mongering and hatred, to consider creating hope, optimism and love. Open your arms to these people, these refugees trying to get into our country, and open your hearts.”

Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for the Cruz campaign, said in an email that the senator was “a huge fan of the film and the actors in it.”

“Having some fun with a cult classic like ‘The Princess Bride’ should be something we can all get behind, politics aside,” she said.