Can 007 really carry a tune?
Daniel Craig is top of a list of actors being considered to follow Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins in a new big screen version of My Fair Lady, which will star Keira Knightley as Eliza Doolittle.
No approach has been made, and certainly no decision will be reached about the identity of exactly who will play Higgins until a director has been hired. But Craig is highly favoured.
Whether he can sing is another matter, but then Harrison wasn't exactly world-class in the singing department. But it didn't matter. He was charm personified and his
talk-singing thrilled audiences.
Theatre-trained Craig will have no trouble learning how to carry a tune. I mean, he took very well to running across rooftops in Casino Royale, and he's dashingly rugged in the forthcoming World War II movie drama, Defiance.
All very handy playing an elocution expert.
'Seriously, though, he's a real man and you'll be able to believe that he really cares for Eliza,' a friend, intimate to the thinking of the film's producers Cameron Mackintosh and Duncan Kenworthy, told me.
But, before any further casting can be done, a director must be allowed some say-so.
Who will direct the film? That's still being decided. I did hear a rumour that Steven Spielberg had expressed an interest. But wouldn't he turn the much-loved story into something approaching a theme-park ride?
Perhaps a director like Stephen Daldry, who can handle romance, drama and musicals, should be approached. He works well with actresses.
He helped Nicole Kidman win her first Oscar, for The Hours, and he also persuaded Kate Winslet to give one of her greatest performances in the big award contender The Reader, the fascinatingly complex story of post-war German guilt, love and humanity that opens here next month. And he directed Billy Elliot.
If Daldry can't do it, what about Danny Boyle, director of the hit film Slumdog Millionaire, another Oscar hopeful and probably the most uplifting film you'll see for a long time?
Emma Thompson, who has written the screenplay for the new My Fair Lady, from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and Alan Jay Lerner's 'book' for the musical, told Variety this week that she'd like her friend Hugh Laurie to play Higgins.
Well, let's wait and see. Filming's due to start in 2010, but the cast is likely to lay down song tracks late next year.
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