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CATE PROJECTS
Teletext UK reported last week that Ecosse and Film Four are adapting Sebastian Faulks' Second World War thriller, "Charlotte Gray",
and that Cate has been signed to the lead.
For more background on this novel, Amazon offers this:
Faulks's first novel since the extraordinary success of Birdsong is written with the same passion, power and breadth of vision. Set in England and France during the darkest days of World War II, Charlotte Gray, like Birdsong, depicts a complex love affair that is both shaped and thwarted by war.It is 1942. London is blacked out, but France is under a greater darkness, as the occupying Nazi forces encroach ever closer in a tense waiting game. Charlotte Gray, a volatile but determined young woman, travels south from Edinburgh. Working in London, she has a brief but intense love affair with an RAF pilot.
When his plane is lost over France, she contrives to go there herself to work in the Resistance and to search for him--but then is unwilling to leave as she finds that the struggle for the country's fate is intimately linked to her own battle to take control of her life.
Faulks's novel is an examination of lost paradises, politics without belief, the limits of memory, the redemptive power of art and the existence of hope beyond reason. It is also a brilliant evocation of life in Occupied France and, more significantly, a revelation of the appalling price many Frenchmen paid to survive in unoccupied, so-called Free France.
As the men, women and children of Charlotte's small town prepare to meet their terrible destiny, the truth of what took place in wartime France is finally exposed. When private lives and public events fatally collide, the roots of the characters' lives are torn up and exposed.
British reviewers' praise for Charlotte Gray:
"It would take a mile-long essay to do justice to the many virtues of Sebastian Faulks's wonderful new novel. This riveting account of a young Scotswoman's odyssey through wartime London, and on into a perilous secret mission in Vichy France, deserves the highest praise. . . . Proustian cogitations, masterful narrative, and zestful pen portraits. A beautiful, near-masterpiece." --The Independent on Sunday
"One of the most impressive novelists of his generation . . . who is growing in authority with every book." --Sunday Telegraph
"A worthy successor to Birdsong. It is hard to imagine anyone who enjoyed the last novel not finding great interest and pleasure in this one. In Charlotte, Faulks has created a wonderfully complex and engaging heroine, with whom it is hard not to fall a little in love."--Daily Express
"Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time. Its page-turning quality in no way undermines the darkness that it describes."--Literary Review
"Faulks is beyond doubt a master."--Financial Times
So, that certainly sounds exciting. And, we can't help but be struck by shades of "Plenty" in terms of the subject matter.
On another front, we have word that Katie Holmes, who most recently appeared with Helen Mirren in Teaching Mrs Tingle, has been signed to star opposite Cate in the supernatural thriller The Gift, to be directed by the gifted Sam Raimi.
She will film it concurrently with her television series "Dawson's Creek", commuting between Warner Bros and Paramount film studios. Co-written by Oscar-winner Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, The Gift is set in a small Arkansas town and tells the story of a woman with extra-sensory perception (Cate) who is asked to help find a young woman who has disappeared (Katie).
The film's akin to the Raimi-directed A Simple Plan, which takes place in a rural setting and had taken years to make it to the screen. Raimi most recently helmed For Love of the Game.
