Jennifer Love Hewitt wasn’t awful as Audrey Hepburn in ABC’s 2000 biopic, and there’s no reason why Lindsay Lohan should be awful as Elizabeth Taylor in Lifetime’s “Liz & Dick.” It was announced yesterday that Lohan, who posed as Taylor on the June 2006 cover of Interview magazine, has been cast in the upcoming television movie about the late star’s tempestuous relationship with Richard Burton, to whom she was married twice.
After five years of misery, involving drug and alcohol addiction, DUI arrests, jail terms, house arrest, rehab, and community service, Lohan, 25, has been handed an opportunity that could potentially put her career back on track, although Rosie O’Donnell, for one, doesn’t think so. "The last thing she did good, she was 16," O’Donnell said on the Today show this morning. “I don't think she's right for the role and I don't think she's capable at this point of doing what's needed."
Despite her wild image, Lohan’s on-screen persona is essentially sweet and ingenuous, as she demonstrated during her “comeback” hosting “Saturday Night Live” on March 3. Whether she can capture Taylor’s fieriness and she-wolf intensity without parodying it, which is surely what the film will require, it’s frequently forgotten that Lohan is gifted. Her performances in “Freaky Friday,” “Mean Girls,” “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Bobby,” and “Georgia Rule” were not those of a commonplace actress. If she can stay on course as Taylor and regain Hollywood’s trust, who knows what she can achieve?
“Liz & Dick,” scheduled for a June Start, is being produced by Larry A. Thompson (“Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter”) and scripted by Chris Monger, director of “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain” and writer of “Temple Grandin.” Monger is Welsh, which won’t hurt his conception of Burton.
Finding an actor to play the hellraising, unfulfilled star, who first met Taylor at a party and fell in love with her on the set of “Cleopatra” (1963), will be harder. Tom Hardy could be right, especially as his gravelly voice is vaguely reminiscent of Burton’s, but after the success of “Inception,” a Lifetime movie with LiLo may not tempt him. Is James Franco busy?