Ben Child 

Elle Fanning to play Mary Shelley for Wadjda director Haifaa al-Mansour

Pioneering Saudi film-maker has cast the young Maleficent actor as the Frankenstein author in A Storm in the Stars, writes Ben Child
  
  

Elle Fanning
Graduating to adulthood … Elle Fanning at Comic-Con 2014. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/REUTERS

Elle Fanning will play Mary Shelley in the story of the budding author's romance with poet Percy, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Haifaa al-Mansour, the pioneering Saudi Arabian female film-maker whose debut feature film Wadjda was a festival smash two years ago, is on board to direct the period romantic drama, titled A Storm in the Stars.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (the daughter of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher/novelist William Godwin), as she was known prior to marrying Shelley, was just 17 when she met her future husband and embarked on a controversial affair with the poet. Percy was married, and remained so for two years until 1816, when his wife Harriet committed suicide.

By that time Mary had written the iconic gothic-horror novel Frankenstein at the age of just 19. The film-makers are confident that Fanning, who was 16 in April, has the poise to graduate from child actor to more adult themes through the project.

"Elle is amazingly smart and talented and very much relates to Mary as a young woman," producer Amy Baer told the Hollywood Reporter. "She is going to do something extraordinary in this role that will transition her from a compelling young adult to a formidable leading lady."

Likewise, Al-Mansour appears a good choice to take charge of the cameras. Saudi Arabia's first female film director has form when it comes to tales of ambitious young women: Wadjda centred on an 11-year-old girl from Riyadh whose pitifully humble aspirations seem destined to be thwarted by her country's repressive attitudes towards woman and girls.

A Storm in the Stars is described as a film which "aims to tell of the tumult of first love of a young woman out of step with her time", according to the Hollywood Reporter's original article. Al-Mansour hopes to shoot in 2015 from a screenplay by Australian writer Emma Jensen, though financing has yet to be secured. With Fanning currently among the best-known young actors of her generation following a supporting role in Disney's Maleficent, such issues are likely to prove a formality.

• Xan Brooks' review of Wadjda
• Video interview with Elle Fanning and Alice Englert for Ginger & Rosa

 

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