She's currently shooting the futuristic Mad Max: Fury Road, but Charlize Theron has been turning her attention to more contemporary events in her down time. Along with producer Basil Iwanyk, Theron has just optioned the Vanity Fair article Marie Colvin's Private War, with a view to creating a biopic about the crusading journalist.

Colvin was a Sunday Times war correspondent, specialising in the Middle East, whose fearless work saw her embedded in the likes of Kosovo, Chechnya, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. She interviewed Colonel Gadaffi right after the US bombing of Libya in 1986, and again in 2011 while reporting on the Arab Spring. She was instrumental in saving the lives of 1500 women and children in East Timor in 1999, when she refused to abandon their besieged compound, and continued to report from the scene for four days until their evacuation.

Colvin lost her left eye to a Sri Lankan rocket propelled grenade in 2001, but described the recent conflict in Syria and the bombardment of Homs as the worst she'd ever experienced. Along with French photographer Remi Ochlik, she was tragically killed in February of this year while fleeing a building being shelled by the Syrian army.

The Vanity Fair article detailing Colvin's extraordinary life was written by Marie Brenner, whose article The Man Who Knew Too Much previously formed the basis of Michael Mann's brilliant The Insider. 

Theron is currently only attached to the Colvin film project as a producer, but you'd have to imagine that she'd also be very interested in the starring role. It's early days yet, however: the details are still being hammered out between Iwanyk and Peter Lawson's Thunder Road production company (not to be confused with Fury Road) and Theron's own Denver and Delilah Productions. The next job will be to find a screenwriter.