Rachel to play Hedy Lamarr

Source:  Rope of  Silicon

The Hollywood Reporter brings the first word of casting out of Cannes saying Rachel Weisz is “loosely” attached to play MGM icon Hedy Lamarr in Amy Redford’s indie feature Face Value.

THR’s Steven Zeitchik says the film centers on the Austrian-American actress who garnered fame in the 1940s for her luminous screen presence, most famously for playing Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah. The film will focus on Lamarr’s eccentric life, particularly her less-publicized second career as a scientist.

As a scientist, Lamarr helped create a method of changing frequencies — known as frequency-hopping — that became a forerunner to modern wireless communications. That pursuit will be the primary subject of Redford’s film, which was written by Jose Rivera and Gretchen Somerfeld.

The notion Weisz is loosely attached and the note in Zeitchik’s article saying Charlize Theron’s name was at one time in connection with the part, leads me to believe this isn’t a done deal of any sort.

Weisz will be seen in limited theaters this week in Summit’s The Brothers Bloom and will be seen for the first time in Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora at Cannes, a film in which she plays the legendary astronomer Hypatia, trapped in the legendary Library of Alexandria, and her fight to save the old world’s wisdom from the religious riots sweeping the streets of Alexandria.

She will also be seen later this year in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and was recently cast in The Whistleblower for Larysa Kondracki. That film is based on the true story of Kathryn Bolkovac, who traveled to Bosnia in 1999 as a U.N. peacekeeper. The story chronicles the trials of a female cop (Weisz) from Nebraska who serves as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and exposes a United Nations cover-up of a sex trafficking scandal. Weisz will obviously be playing the female cop.