Joe Wright re-teams with Keira Knightley for MY FAIR LADY!

Since I first spoke of Keira Knightley's casting as Eliza Doolittle on 06.06.08, the Columbia Pictures remake of the 8 time Oscar winning Rex Harrison/Audrey Hepburn musical My Fair Lady has lured Joe Wright(Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) into the director's chair and writer/actress Emma Thompson to pen the screenplay. It's the kind of paint by numbers hiring that is all to familiar with these kind of period projects. Wright and Knightley fit together like jam and butter (Knightley being the sweet sugar rush to the taste buds where Wright is the substance layer underneath, the smooth surface of goodness that improves the taste) and Keira's best performances have come when she has worked under him. Neither are quite as good without each other (did you see a Knightley less Wright movie by the name of The Soloist????). Thompson also is an obvious choice having adapted Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility very successfully in the mid 90's and having acted as the "go to scribe" when Knightley/Wright needed a dialogue re-write on Pride and Prejudice. The plan as of last June was to use the original movie's score and the 1912 setting, where the new film would hopefully "dramatize the emotional highs and lows of Doolittle as she undergoes the ultimate metamorphosis under the tutelage of Professor Henry Higgins".

Knightley has been taking singing and dancing lessons for over a year which at least shows her ambition to bring George Bernard Shaw's musical to life on screen (Hepburn was famously dubbed in the 1964 version and despite Oscar noms for most of her peers, she wasn't nominated) and on a first glance level she does radiate a modern day sense of Audrey Hepburn about her, at least in terms of star appeal, her look/demeanor and her status as a modern day fashion icon. Though maybe I'll shed a tear that Anne Hathaway - a wonderful stage performer, who has more smile and charisma than Hathaway, has been overlooked this time. What a wonderful stage pairing herself and Hugh Jackman would have made. Anyway, The Telegraph seemed to have picked Daniel Craig's name out of hat for the Rex Harrison's role. Now that would be interesting, no?