Alternative Film Guide

Academy Award winner Sofia Coppola, 33, was due to begin shooting scenes of her current project, Marie-Antoinette, inside the Versailles palace. Coppola, who won her Oscar for her original screenplay for Lost in Translation, loosely based the script for her biopic of the Austrian-born queen of France on Antonia Fraser’s book Marie-Antoinette: The Journey.

Kirsten Dunst has been cast as the English-speaking Austrian-French queen. Jason Schwartzman will play her husband, King Louis XVI, and veteran Rip Torn will play Louis XV, a role turned down by Alain Delon. (Schwartzman is Coppola’s cousin; he’s the son of actress Talia Shire, the sister of director Francis Ford Coppola, who happens to be Sofia’s father.)

In the 1938 Marie Antoinette directed by W. S. Van Dyke, the Queen of MGM, Norma Shearer, played the Queen of France; Robert Morley, stealing every scene, played Louis XVI, and a bewigged Tyrone Power was borrowed from Twentieth-Century Fox to play the queen’s (fictitious) lover. Shearer and Morley were both nominated for Academy Awards. (Morley’s nomination was in the supporting category.) The sumptuous production was much too expensive, ultimately failing to recover its cost.

 

 

 

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