Last week, news broke that Oscar winning superstar Jennifer Lawrence may headline Zelda, an upcoming biopic of writer and literary muse Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Now comes word, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter, that competing Zelda Fitzgerald biopic may be in the works with Scarlett Johansson attached to star. For a figure that for most of her life lived under the shadows of more famous husband as well as her mental stability, Zelda Fitzgerald seems to be quickly becoming a hot commodity in Hollywood.
As previously reported, Zelda appears to have a sharp pedigree associated with Lawrence, a possible director in Ron Howard (who won an Oscar for helming the 2001 biopic A Beautiful Mind) as well as screenwriter Emma Frost (The White Queen) and producer Allison Shearmur. That film will take its roots in Nancy Milford’s best-selling biography of “the first American flapper.”
The project that may feature Johansson is set to titled The Beautiful and the Damned, itself a riff on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work The Beautiful and Damned, a novel that has been noted as a thinly veiled tale of the real-life Fitzgerald marriage. Hanna Weg (Septembers of Shiraz) penned the script and Millennium Films is aboard to finance the movie. More so, and perhaps a leg up on it’s competition, The Beautiful and the Damned has already aligned cooperation from the Fitzgerald estate. As of now, no director is attached to project and as with the competing Lawrence film, no start date nor eventual release information have been announced or confirmed.
Johansson last appeared on screen in the summer blockbuster Captain America: Civil War. Earlier this year, she provided voice work to the Disney hit The Jungle Book and co-starred in the old-Hollywood throwback Hail, Caesar! from Joel and Ethan Coen. Later this year, we will hear (but not see) the actress in the upcoming animated feature Sing. Next year, Johansson will headline both Ghost in the Shell and Rock That Body before resuming Natasha Romanoff work in 2018.
While Zelda Fitzgerald has been a character multiple times in a great many projects over the years, most often she has been on the periphery – think Alison Pill’s performance in Midnight in Paris and Vanessa Kirby in last summer’s Genius. That appears to be changing. Also coming soon is the Amazon series Z: The Beginning of Everything which will star Christina Ricci. Everything’s coming up Zelda it seems.
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