Knightley: Beautiful and/or Damned?

Keira Knightley, fashion historian. 

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Keira Knightley is in talks to play Zelda Fitzgerald in The Beautiful and the Damned, a film about Zelda and her husband, author F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hanna Weg wrote the screenplay and Nick Cassavetes will direct.

If you weren’t paying attention in English class, Fitzgerald is most famous for writing The Great Gatsby. He wrote numerous superb short stories and several other novels, including one called The Beautiful and the Damned, which although it contains some biographical elements, does not appear to be source material for this film. In the 1920s, Scott and Zelda were Jazz Age icons, whose partying and glamorous lifestyle seemed the height of modernity. They hit the marital skids on a number of fronts, though, by the end of the decade–Scott’s alcoholism was worsening and Zelda was trying to forge her own identity away from him, including an obsesson with becoming a ballerina–in her late twenties–that led her to practice hours and hours each day. This was one of the symptoms of the mental illness into which she would never recover; suffering from a type of schizophrenia, Zelda spent the last years of her life in a mental institution.

Knightley’s not really right for the role, as Zelda was not considered particularly pretty–to be honest, Scott was prettier–while Knightley undoubtedly is; Zelda captivated people mostly with her charisma and vivacious personality, something Knightley, although certainly very nice, has never really displayed. However, the most important thing is that this will allow her to knock “1920s” off her fashion parade of costume dramas. She’ll look lovely in the meticulously recreated flapper fashions, and I guess that’s the biggest thing for all the producers and marketing people involved in this film.