THR is reporting that Eva Green and Gemma Arterton have signed up to star in Vita & Virginia, which is being produced by Blinder Films’ Katie Holly.
Chanya Button (Burn Burn Burn) will direct the film, from a script by Dame Eileen Atkins, based on her play of the same name. The film will follow the romance and friendship between authors Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West is best known for her pastoral epic, The Land (1927), and as the inspiration for the androgynous protagonist in Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928).
In 1994, the play Vita and Virginia ran Off-Broadway, at Union Square Theater, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Atkins. Green will star as Virginia Woolf and Arterton will play Vita Sackville-West.
In addition to Holly, Evangelo Kioussis of Mirror Productions produces. with Green, Arterton and Mirror’s Simon Baxter as executive producers. Protagonist Pictures will handle sales on the project at this week’s European Film Market in Berlin.
Speaking on the news Protagonist CEO Mike Goodridge said:
We just love this witty and evocative screenplay by Eileen Atkins and Chanya Button. This is a playful and sexual Virginia Woolf, far removed from the gloom often associated with her, and Vita Sackville-West is a vivacious and flamboyant character who dominates high society in London in the 1920s. Embodied by the glorious actresses Eva Green and Gemma Arterton and directed by the inspired Chanya, we believe Vita & Virginia will be warmly embraced around the world.
Director Button added:
The prospect of collaborating with Dame Eileen Atkins, Eva Green and Gemma Arterton in bringing the mercurial passion that Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West shared to life is beyond a privilege. We so often associate women of the past with oppression, bound by the duties of marriage, propriety and domesticity; but what Vita & Virginia offers is an example of a relationship where bold, brilliant women bent these institutions to their will at great personal cost. Focusing on the time in 1927-8 during which Woolf wrote Orlando, the novel their relationship inspired, Vita & Virginia will be a visceral love story, a vivid exploration of creativity, and an energised perspective on one of our most iconic writers.