Movies and television films are mining like crazy the lives of past Hollywood stars for foreshortened biopics based on life-changing events.
Michelle Williams played Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn.” Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler played Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “Liz & Dick,” and have been followed more recently by Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West in “Burton and Taylor.” Nicole Kidman is Princess Grace (Kelly) in “Grace of Monaco.”
Kevin Kline has been cast as ageing Lothario Errol Flynn in “The Last of Robin Hood.” Carice van Houten will star in a Greta Garbo biopic. A James Dean road movie, which ARTINFO reported on here, is as yet uncast.
Next on the blocks is an adaptation of Chris Greenhalgh’s 2012 novel “Seducing Ingrid Bergman,” which will be made by the “Grace of Monaco” team of producer Uday Chopra and screenwriter Amash Amel. It will tell the story of Bergman’s adulterous affair with Robert Capa, which began in 1945 when he slipped a note under the actress’s Paris hotel room door, inviting her to go for a drink. At the time she was married to Petter Aron Lindström. Their daughter Pia Lindström was 6.
It is the second recently announced movie that will depict an episode in Capa’s love life. Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell will play Capa and his fellow war photographer Gerda Taro in Paul Andrew Williams’s “Close Enough,” which ended with Taro’s death at 26 in the Spanish Civil War.
Deadline broke the news yesterday of “Seducing Ingrid Bergman,” which Amel seized on because it resonated with “Grace of Monaco.” He told Mike Fleming Jr.: “It struck me that Grace and Ingrid had to deal with identical dilemmas for these modern women in repressed times.”
Bergman’s affair with Capa not only began the end of her marriage to Lindström but started the process by which she liberated herself from the shackles of Hollywood and its hypocritical morality. The marriage survived until her subsequent affair with the Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini, which led to their 1950-57 marriage and produced three children (Isabella being born in 1952). The resulting scandal led to her ostracism from Hollywood, which ended when she won the 1956 Best Actress for her performance in “Anastasia.”
Chopra and Amel want a “top actress” to play Bergman, who was born in Stockholm in 1915. Scarlett Johansson, 28, is half-Danish and could be a credible fit. Since her portrayal of a polite and professional Janet Leigh was tangential to “Hitchcock,” she might be installed as an early favorite to play Bergman, who was 29 when Capa sent her his note. Other contenders could be the French actress Léa Seydoux, 27, fresh from her Cannes success with “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” and the Swedish star Noomi Rapace.