Swapping the glass slipper for a bathing costume, Cinderella star Lily James has now signed up to head the cast of The Young Woman And The Sea. She'll play the swimmer Gertrude Ederle in a biopic based on the book by Glenn Stout. Jerry Bruckheimer is producing the film for Paramount, and has tasked Jeff Nathanson (Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) with the screenplay.
Ederle was the first woman ever to swim the English Channel: still a rarer achievement than scaling Everest. The American teenager completed the impressive feat in 1926, two years after winning gold at the 1924 Paris Olympics. She returned to the US one of the most famous women in the world, cheered through a tickertape parade in New York by an estimated crowd of 2 million people. But she disappeared from the public eye just as quickly. After playing herself in the film Swim Girl, Swim she embarked on an abortive career in vaudeville, and after a fall that damaged her spine, ended up teaching swimming to children. She died in 2003, aged 98.
Following Downton Abbey and Cinderella, James has been busy. She appeared in Burnt with Bradley Cooper and stars as Elizabeth Bennet in the forthcoming Pride And Prejudice And Zombies; she's just completed filming a new mini-series of Tolstoy's epic War And Peace; she's currently filming The Kaiser's Last Kiss; and after that she moves on to Edgar Wright's Baby Driver with Jon Hamm, Ansel Elgort and Jamie Foxx.
The Young Woman And The Sea then, is some way off - and whether it retains the book's Hemingway-riffing title remains to be seen. Burnt is out in the UK on Friday.