Forget all yer queens and that nonsense – surely the coolest woman to emerge from the 1800s was Ada Lovelace, largely credited with helping kickstart scientific computing. Now she’ll be hitting the screen with Billy Crudup as her hubby, William King.
According to Production Weekly, Bruce Beresford is directing Enchantress Of Numbers, with Crudup and Toby Jones in talks to take the leads.
Jones would be playing Charles Babbage, the mathematician and philosopher who pioneered the concepts for mechanical computing. Lovelace, who was the daughter of the poet Byron, was one of the few people who understood Babbage’s ideas and created a program for one of his machines, which, sadly he never got to finish in his lifetime. But Difference Engines have since been built from his designs, which prove that he was right.
Beresford plans to shoot the period drama, which would chronicle the time they spent working together, in the autumn.