Veteran of three wars, Pulitzer-winning novelist, journalist, womaniser, big game hunter and the kind of drinker to make Olly Reed look like Anne Widdicombe... it's safe to say Ernest Hemingway lived a wide-screen life. Which is particularly handy, with The Gotham Group optioning rights for a biopic and Papa potentially heading to our screens in the couple of years.
The film will cover be based on A.E. Hotchner's intimate biography 'Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir', a New York Times bestseller that explores the final 14 years of the great novelist's life. Hotchner was close to Hemingway throughout that turbulent period - it was Hotchner's book that revealed the writer had committed suicide - so the film adaptation should be a faithful account. As the biographer says, "It is rare that we have such intimate, truthful knowledge about the life and, ultimately, demise of a true American icon."
And what a demise. The writer spent the last years of his life in a spiral of alcoholism and depression, although his luck saw him through two plane crashes, a bush fire and the Cuban Revolution. The period also saw the publication of two of his best known works: A Moveable Feast and The Old Man And The Sea, for which he won the Nobel Prize.
It's been a big week for literary biopics, with Ian Fleming also in the full cinematic treatment. We suspect the bearded, 6"2, heavy-set Hemingway aged 50 might be even harder to cast than the urbane Fleming. Send your casting tips...