Elle Fanning to Play Mary Shelley in New Biopic by Wadjda‘s Haifaa Al-Mansour
IT'S ALIIIIIIIIVE.
Mother of science fiction (well, one of them—meet Margaret Cavendish) Mary Shelley, writer of Frankenstein, is getting the Shakespeare In Love treatment. Calling it right now: Ben Affleck for Lord Byron.
The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Elle Fanning is set to play Mary Shelley in A Storm in the Stars, which will be directed Haifaa al-Mansour (the first female director hailing from Saudi Arabia—incidentally her Wadjda was one of our 50 female-directed movies you should watch), written by Emma Jensen, and produced by Amy Baer, Joannie Burstein, and Rebecca Miller. That’s a lot of ladies working behind the scenes on this female-centric movie. I’m having flashbacks to Belle. It’s a good feeling.
As THR tells us, Storm will be about the “passionate love affair” between a 17-year-old Mary Shelley (née Wollstonecraft) and the “dangerously charismatic” (and already married) Percy Bysshe Shelley, which began a year before the former would write Frankenstein. But it sounds like the movie has more up its sleeve than happy-sappy romance; instead, it “aims to tell of the tumult of first love of a young woman out of step with her time.” Historical costume drama. ~~~Romance~~~, but romance with what sounds like an undercurrent of social issues and feminism (especially given how Shelley’s mother penned this barn burner). Mary Shelley.
Bring me my smelling salts and my copy of The Bride of Frankenstein, I am ready to roll.
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