Cleopatra Rises Again

London film company Archer Street Productions, headed by Hilary and Jackie director Anand Tucker, is working on a new big screen version of Cleopatra - the first for almost four decades. The last movie based on the Egyptian Queen was the Liz Taylor and Richard Burton epic that cost an unprecedented $44 million to make (around $300 million today) and nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. A report in today's Variety suggests that the UK company, which is developing Cleopatra for Universal Pictures, has 'a new perspective on the story'. Other projects being worked on by Archer Street include a new version of the 1960s movie Gambit and a film version of The Railway Man - the autobiography of Japanese POW Eric Lomax . This will be the second adaptation of the story - the first, Prisoners in Time was made for TV in 1995 and starred John Hurt as Lomax.