Here’s Murtada checking in with a few of our favorite ladies treading the boards across the globe.
A kiss from Keira on this month's ELLEKeira Knightley in New York
What to do after securing your second Oscar nomination and having your first child the same year you turn 30? Why, make your Broadway debut of course! Starting in October Knightley will star in the Roundabout Theater’s production of Therese Raquin. The play is based on the Emile Zola novel about family, illicit love and murder. Lets hope it’s juicier than DOA recent screen adaptation, In Secret. In that version Elizabeth Olsen played Therese, but despite a stellar supporting cast - Jessica Lange and Oscar Isaac - it vanished quickly from screens.
more Keira and two Oscar winners after the jump...
For this stage adaptation there’s reason to to be hopeful. The cast includes the always fantastic Judith Light - so good on TV in Transparent - as Knightley’s mother-in-law and nemesis. And of course the main draw herself who reached a career high last year with the double punch of Begin Again and The Imitation Game. After singing gloriously on screen and stealing Game from its lead with her open hearted performance, she is ready to conquer the stage.
Pure Theatrical ViagraNicole Kidman in London
Kidman keeps busy. We’ve already seen her in one movie in 2015, she has five more in the can and plans to shoot a TV series (perhaps two) in the next few months. However it has been 17 years since she’s been on stage. In 1998 she triumphed in David Hare’s The Blue Room, so much so that the London Telegraph’s theater critic famously dubbed her “pure theatrical viagra”.
And so back to the West End she goes. In early September she reunites with director Michael Grandage for whom she just worked on film in Genius with Jude Law and Colin Firth. In Photograph 51 she plays real life British scientist Rosalind Franklin who identified how DNA is structured. The play, by writer Anna Ziegler, is about the sexism and hostility that kept Franklin out of the limelight and won her male colleagues the Nobel. Sounds like crackling material that Kidman can sink her teeth into.
Another Stoli Martini?Cate Blanchett in Sydney
Blanchett wowed us at Cannes with her superior sartorial choices. She’ll soon make us swoon, as she did the critics at Cannes, in Todd Haynes’ Carol. Currently, though, it’s curtain call time for her illustrious career at the Sydney Theater Company as she's planning a move to the US at the end of the year. And she's going out with a bang.
She opened this week in The Present, an adaptation of Chekhov's first and mostly ignored play Platonov. The part was hand crafted for her by her husband, playwright Andrew Upton, who moved the setting from the 18th century to 1990s Russia. Blanchett stars with Richard Roxburgh (Moulin Rouge) in what is being billed as a tale of “yearning, vodka and shattered dreams”. The director is Jon Crowley, of the upcoming Saoirse Ronan starrer Brooklyn, who amusingly was once attached to Carol.
Blanchett got her usual raves. The last time she performed Chekov on stage with Uncle Vanya, the production toured New York and Washington. So far there are no plans to tour, but if her last few plays are an indication, an international tour is assured.
Are you lucky enough to be seeing any of these productions?