Fatal attraction of one powerful dame
Duncan Campbell in London
March 21, 2007AFTER the success of the British film The Queen, it was probably inevitable. And on Monday it was announced that Thatcher - The Movie was under way.
The film company Pathe, one of the backers of The Queen, and BBC Films have commissioned a script about the former British prime minister that will focus on the 17 days immediately before the start of the Falklands War in 1982.
The script will be by Brian Fillis, who wrote last year’s BBC TV biopic about the television cook Fanny Cradock. The producer will be Damian Jones (The History Boys), who devised the concept with Fillis, according to the showbusiness newspaper Variety.
Before the Falklands War, the now Baroness Thatcher was deeply unpopular in Britain and it was widely predicted she would lose the next election. Her image as the Iron Lady was forged by the war and her decision to send the armed forces to the South Atlantic.
But who will portray her?“I would put my chances of playing her at somewhere between zero and nought,” said Steve Nallon, the actor and comedian who has probably portrayed her more than anyone else. “I won’t be sitting by my phone … The secret is to get the voice right - most people make her talk very slowly - and to forget any liberal leftie leanings you might have and play her with conviction, just as if you were doing Lady Macbeth - who she’s a bit like, come to think of it.”
Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian’s film critic, said Julia Davis, who played Cradock in Fear of Fanny, was well equipped for the role, as was Sharon Stone. “And you could have Al Pacino as [General Leopoldo] Galtieri,” he said, referring to the military dictator who led Argentina into the war.
Hollywood awaits
:shock: …I know several years had passed since basic instinct, but honestly In cant imagine two more different womens. it remind me a chapter of “The simpsons” in wich some filmmakers used horses to portrait cows.
