Improvements to simple Hangman Game in Python
This is a great start. Let me point out a few things you should consider.
Make it interactive
When I ran the code, it produces some numbers whenever I lose a guess, it took a while to figure out that it was my guess count incrementing. A nice prompt message would be helpful. Also the guess count should reduce for each guess made.
Avoid hardcorded values
What is 5 in the following statement
while lives &lt; 5:. it can be written as follow
MAX_LIVES = 5
while lives &lt;= MAX_LIVES:

Misleading names
character_check is just too misleading, promises one thing(to check a character) and does another thing(recieves input from the user). This can rewritten as user_input
Features worth adding

You could make the game a class,implement a board class to nicely draw the man being hung.
You could also implement a hint package interface, user might want to buy and use hints when they are stuck.