Former Bond girls Eva Green and Gemma Arterton will play lovers in a new film about late author Virginia Woolf.
Vita & Virginia will centre on Woolf’s relationship and love affair with fellow writer Vita Sackville-West. Green will portray Woolf and Arterton will play West.
Burn, Burn, Burn’s Chanya Button will direct the movie and Eileen Atkins, who wrote the 1992 play of the same name, has penned the script.
“Focusing on the time in 1927 to 1928, during which Woolf wrote Orlando, the novel their relationship inspired, Vita & Virginia, will be a visceral love story, a vivid exploration of creativity, and an energised perspective on one of our most iconic writers,” Button says.
“We so often associate women of the past with oppression, bound by the duties of marriage, propriety and domesticity; but what Vita & Virginia offers is an example of a relationship where bold, brilliant women bent these institutions to their will at great personal cost,” she adds.
Green is the latest actress to portray Woolf onscreen – Nicole Kidman won an Academy Award in 2003 for her role as Woolf in The Hours, while the author has also been played by Catherine McCormack, Harriet Walter and Joanna McCallum in the 1994 film Tom & Viv.
Atkins has also played the writer in 1988’s Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and on TV in A Room of One’s Own in 1991.
Green and Arterton played Bond girls Vesper Lynd and Strawberry Fields in back to back 007 movies Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.
