Though she shares a name with Mrs Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway will be taking on another historical figure in an upcoming biopic. The 22-year-old star of The Princess Diaries and Brokeback Mountain is set to play author Jane Austen in Becoming Jane, a planned portrait of the woman behind Pride and Prejudice.
“I know, I can’t believe it’s an American either,” she told Empire. “I can do the accent, they wouldn’t have hired me if I couldn’t. I’m attached to it and we’re trying to get financing for it. Jane Austen is one of the most special literary figures. I don’t want to short change her in any way.”
The film, written by TV scribe Kevin Hood (Man and Boy, Medics) is not a traditional biopic, instead taking a portion of Austen’s life that reflects the wild romanticism of her beloved novels.
“It’s the time at which she’s been writing for a bit and has just started work on Pride and Prejudice,” Hathaway continues. “Largely it’s based on a biography by Claire Tomlin which suggests that Jane had a love affair with an Irishman that nobody knew about. The movie is about how that love affair affected her as a writer and a woman. The choices she had to make about it are heartbreaking. It’s actually a very dramatic story that winds up resembling a lot of her novels. You see shades of all of her major works in it.”