BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Wouldn't it be luvverly? Keira Knightley in line to play Eliza Doolittle in new film (original) (raw)

keira knightley

Keira Knightley is being lined up to play the 'guttersnipe' Eliza Doolittle in a new film version of My Fair Lady

Oscar-nominated film-maker Stephen Daldry is in negotiations to direct a new film version of My Fair Lady, with Keira Knightley playing the 'guttersnipe' Eliza Doolittle.

Daldry believes that people have been 'fooled' for nearly half a century into thinking that the 1964 screen My Fair Lady was a great movie.

'It's all about Cecil Beaton's sets and costumes, isn't it? Which are fantastic - as are the songs, of course. It's a visual masterpiece - but it needs to be more than that. It's a clunky movie,' he told me.

Daldry is an astute choice to direct My Fair Lady because he's adept at injecting a sense of realism into his musical work (Billy Elliot); and he's brilliant with actors - and text.

And Daldry, whose film The Reader is in the running for five Academy Awards including best picture, will work closely with Emma Thompson, who has been contracted by producers Duncan Kenworthy and Cameron Mackintosh to write a new screenplay for My Fair Lady.

Emma told me she had gone back to George Bernard Shaw's biting social satire Pygmalion, the source material for the Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical, for her script. She has also studied new scenes Shaw penned for the 1938 film of Pygmalion.

She told me she thought all of the Lerner-Loewe songs would be used - and kept in the same order.

audrey hepburn

Rex Harrison, left, and Audrey Hepburn in the 1964 version of My Fair Lady. The film is based on George Bernard Shaw's biting social satire Pygmalion

stephen daldry

Film-maker Stephen Daldry, seen here receiving a Bafta, is in negotiations to direct the new film version

'They move the story forward, so it would be difficult to shift them around,' said Emma, who won an Oscar for her adaptation of Sense And Sensibility.

Once Daldry is officially contracted, he will, with the producers, cast an actor to play Professor Henry Higgins opposite Keira's Eliza Doolittle.

Daldry has directed Daniel Craig, now best known as James Bond, several times on stage and Craig's certainly one of several actors under consideration to play Higgins.

Meanwhile Knightley has been having singing lessons.

Filming will begin next year on locations in central London and, possibly, at Royal Ascot.

Worth the wait, Kate

Nervous: Kate Winslet seems favourite to win the Oscar for best actress

Kate Winslet told me she was looking forward to walking the Oscar red carpet with husband Sam Mendes on a night that could see her win a golden statuette for the first time in her career.

She explained how Sam had been busy preparing to open A Winter's Tale in Brooklyn and couldn't attend the Bafta awards, scene of her best actress triumph last Sunday night.

'He couldn't come to the Screen Actors Guild Awards, nor could he make the trip to Berlin, where The Reader was screened.

'I knew for weeks he wouldn't be able to travel on those dates because of the plays he's directing,' Kate told me, while she enjoyed a furtive cigarette break during the Bafta dinner at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

'But just watch him at the Oscars: he'll be stellar and wonderful. He's so calming and together, whereas, as far as the Oscars are concerned, I'm so damned nervous.'

Kate seems to be the favourite to win the best actress award on February 22, ahead of Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Melissa Leo and Anne Hathaway. However, she's certainly not taking it as a given.

'You just don't know what's going to happen. This is my sixth nomination, so it will be the sixth time I've attended an Oscar ceremony and that in itself is a great honour.

'I don't take the nominations for granted. If it happens, then great. If it doesn't, then I'm still going to have a party,' Kate told me.

The 33-year-old has been nominated for her brilliant portrait in The Reader of a German woman, living in the post-war republic, who hides two secrets: one of which guides every move she makes in her life.

She hadn't expected the film to open for this awards season because she also stars alongside Leonard DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road, directed by Mendes, and there was some discussion about respective release dates.

The actress says she is very proud of both films - although it has been tough to promote the pair of them and to find herself being more honoured for the one her husband wasn't involved in.

It's clear, though, that the couple have been through some heat over Revolutionary Road and The Reader. 'We've talked and talked and he has told me how proud he is of me with Revolutionary Road and The Reader.

'What we have been through these past few months has brought us closer together than ever, because we've seen each other up close, in a working environment,' Kate added.

Indeed, I've spent some time with the couple recently in Los Angeles and New York and their relationship strikes me as being deeper than when they first met.

When it comes to the young Beatles, all you need is Thomas

Teen actor Thomas Sangster is learning to play the guitar upside down, with one arm behind his back, because he'll be portraying the left-handed Paul McCartney.

Sangster will join Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff in Nowhere Boy, a movie being directed by awardwinning artist Sam Taylor-Wood, about the teenage years of John Lennon and the two women who shaped his early life: his mother Julia (Ms Duff) and his aunt Mimi (Ms Scott Thomas).

Sangster already plays guitar, but he's right-handed. The 18-year-old will appear in scenes where Lennon and McCartney are about to form The Quarrymen (the skiffle group they played in before it became The Beatles).

Thomas Sangster

Paul McCartney

Thomas Sangster, left, is set to play young Paul McCartney

You may remember seeing Sangster as Liam Neeson's son in the romantic comedy Love, Actually and later in Nanny McPhee.

A more grown-up Sangster appears opposite Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish in Jane Campion's movie Bright Star, about the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne.

I bumped into Ms Taylor-Wood at the ultra-cool club The Double Room, behind the Angel Tube station in North London, at a swanky after-after party hosted by Harvey Weinstein.

'The casting is a huge percentage of the film,' Ms Taylor-Wood told me. 'It has been so important to get the right people for the roles. There were big names after parts, but it was important to go with the right people who can act the parts.

'I've had younger actresses aged with make-up, but realised that wasn't the way to go.'
David Morrissey will play Bobby Dykins, whom many considered Julia's commonlaw husband.

Shooting begins, with Seamus McGarvey behind the camera, on locations in Liverpool next month before moving to Ealing Studios in West London.

Producers at Ecosse Films and HanWay Films are trying (very gently) to persuade Yoko Ono to give permission for some Lennon songs to be used in the movie.

Life could soon get more scary for Carey

Rising star: Carey Mulligan

Carey Mulligan can move around her area of North London without being recognised or pestered, but I would say that by this time next year, that will not be the case.

By then, two of the movies Carey starred in at the Sundance Film Festival - An Education and The Greatest - will have opened and, in the case of An Education (in which she plays a slightly fictionalised version of writer Lynn Barber when she was at school), she will be in the middle of an awards campaign that may or may not catapult her towards Bafta or Oscar nominations.

Carey also has a small role in Michael Mann's gangster movie Public Enemies, which stars Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and also Marion Cotillard.

In the film, Carey plays a platinum blonde nightclub flapper who doesn't get the guy.

'I'm in a nightie, smoking a cigarette, playing a high-class hooker - and then Dillinger dumps me for Marion Cotillard,' Carey told me.

Meanwhile, Carey has just returned from Berlin, where she was voted one of the 'Shooting Stars' (actors to look out for in the near future). Waiting for her were four scripts to choose from, for movies to be made this year.

And next year she will appear with Ralph Fiennes, Ken Stott and, possibly, Maggie Gyllenhaal, in Uncle Vanya in the West End.

The play is to be directed by Matthew Warchus and will be produced by David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers.

Legion of admirers...

Tough guy: Noel Clarke

Noel Clarke is getting into some sword and combat training to play a Roman centurion.

'I'm one of the tough guys in this - I'm NOT playing anyone's slave,' the actor said pointedly.

Clarke, who took home the Orange Bafta rising star award last Sunday, told me he'll be joining Dominic West, Michael Fassbender and Olga Kurylenko in the movie Centurion, which director Neil Marshall will begin filming in Scotland and London later this month.

Christian Colson, one of the film-makers behind the award-winning Slumdog Millionaire, is producing it.

It is about the IXth Legion, which mysteriously disappeared in Britain. Clarke, who walked to the stage with a cheeky swagger and chanted 'Yes, we can!' after accepting his award, starred in the movies Kidulthood and Adulthood.

Later in the year he'll be seen in Heartless with Jim Sturgess: a movie shot in London that's a hopeful for the Cannes Film Festival.

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• Mods and their Vespa and Lambretta scooters will be zipping around the stage when the theatre version of The Who's Quadrophenia opens at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, in May.

Pete Townshend is overseeing casting sessions with director Tom Critchley and casting chief Pippa Ailion.

They're after a youthful cast who can sing (of course!) to play mainly Mods, and a handul of youngsters with quiffs to play Rockers. Franc Roddam's movie version launched the film careers of Phil Daniels, Ray Winstone and Sting.

We're girls who just wanna have fun

Penelope Cruz: Sisterly love

Penelope Cruz gave Kate Winslet a high-five and asked her if she wanted to go for a beer some time.

Kate, meanwhile, was lending her lip gloss to Slumdog Millionaire leading lady Freida Pinto.

There was a lot of sisterly love around back-stage at the Baftas after the winners had their photographs taken.

'We've all got to know each other so well at all these award shows. It's February now, but we've been on the road since well before Christmas and we keep seeing each other - and you become friends and help each other out when you can,' Penelope told me later at The Double Room club in North London, where she had been hanging out with Marion Cotillard (as you do).

Cotillard is one of her many co-stars in the movie musical Nine.

'I like a Guinness sometimes,' Penelope said. 'I like the taste. Going for a beer is, for me, a sort of shorthand for going out and having some jokes.

'I like Kate because she's very down to earth. Underneath all this make-up and glamour, we are just girls who like to have fun when we're able to,' she added.

Is Mr Mead a twentieth century boy?

Lee Mead

Lee Mead is considering portraying late rock star Marc Bolan in a musical called Twentieth Century Boy, which is expected to open later this year.

Mead may choose to do the Bolan project over a musical based on the movie Roman Holiday.

Producers behind Roman Holiday told me that they liked Mead, even though (as I reported last week) he wasn't as fully prepared as the rest of the company at a workshop. Apparently, I am told, poor Lee had less than 24 hours to prepare - unlike others, who had three weeks.

The producers went bonkers when I suggested their show wasn't universally adored!

They claimed it was wonderful - but half-a-dozen or more folk who were also in attendance insist it was, perhaps, not so wonderful.

The Roman Holiday camp said they want Mead for their show. Does this mean there's going to be a tug of war for Mr Mead's services? If so, good for him.

Watch out for...

• David Oyelowo, Naomie Harris, Benedict Cumberbatch and Ruth Wilson, who lead the TV drama based on Andrea Levy's novel Small Island.

The drama has a series of intertwining tales about Jamaican Gilbert Joseph, who joins the RAF and fights for Britain during WWII. Later, his wife Hortense joins him in the UK.

'Gilbert tries to settle in Britain after the war and it's like: "Oh, are you still here?" That's the sense he gets from the Brits, even though he was in the war,' Mr Oyelowo told me during a break from rehearsals.

Filming begins next week on locations in Belfast and London.

More from Baz Bamigboye for the Daily Mail...

• Paul Giamatti, who is in negotiations to play Friar Tuck in Ridley Scott's film Nottingham opposite Russell Crowe and, possibly, Cate Blanchett.

The main players in this movie - Crowe and Scott - wouldn't mind NOT having to do this project, but so many millions have already been spent in pre-production and building of sets (it was to have been shot last year) that they're duty-bound to complete it.

• Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams and Helen Mirren, who star in the big-screen version of State Of Play, a scorching, loosely-based film adaptation of Paul Abbott's BBC series.

Crowe plays the Washington journalist who tries to help his congressman pal Ben Affleck after Affleck's mistress is murdered. I saw an uncompleted version of director Kevin Macdonald's film and it totally held my attention.

I enjoyed it all, particularly Mirren's hard-boiled editor. 'So, where are we? Was he *****ing her or not?' she asks Crowe (pictured). It was thrilling to watch a movie where journalists actually leave the office. Believe me, it doesn't happen that much in the real world any more.

• James McAvoy, Nigel Harman and Lyndsey Marshal, who star in Richard Greenberg's play Three Days Of Rain, which Jamie Lloyd has directed with much brio at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue.

I saw a preview before the critics went in and I had a terrific time. I was struck by the production's energy and the freshness of the performances. I've always been a huge fan of this play about betrayal, sibling rivalry and romance, but I felt I was seeing it for the first time.

• Luke and Harry Treadaway, who are rehearsing Mark Ravenhill's play Over Here, which is set in Berlin before the Wall fell.

I saw Luke at one of the Bafta bashes and he told me that he and his twin have composed a tune or two for the play, which they will perform. Luke just finished filming Pelican Blood, a thriller/love story set in the world of. . . bird watchers. Harry was in the C4 film The Shooting Of Thomas Hurndall.

Over Here begins performances at London's Royal Court on March 2.