Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank has been signed to star in the film of the Cecilia Ahern novel, PS I Love You. Her casting was announced at the 59th Cannes Film Festival yesterday.
Swank, who is from the US state of Nebraska, received the 1999 Oscar for best actress for Boys Don't Cry, in which she played a cross-dressing young woman who took on a male identity, and she took the best actress award again last year for Million Dollar Baby, as an ambitious working-class boxer.
She will play the central character in the film of Ahern's best-selling novel, as a young Irish widow trying to rebuild her life after her husband's death and finding solace in monthly letters he wrote to her before he died.
The director of the film version is Richard LaGravenese, Oscar nominated for his screenplay of The Fisher King.
The producer of the film, which will be released by Warner Bros in the US, is Wendy Finerman, who collected the 1994 best picture Oscar for Forrest Gump. The Walt Disney Company has acquired the film rights to If You Could See Me Now, another novel by Ahern, who is one of the Taoiseach's two daughters. Australian actor Hugh Jackman will star in that film.
Meanwhile, most of the 200-plus Irish delegates at Cannes are likely to take a break from selling scripts and setting up projects this afternoon. The Irish Pavilion, a joint venture between the Irish Film Board and the Northern Ireland Film Commission, has installed facilities to screen Munster's game with Biarritz. It is widely tipped to be more exciting than The Da Vinci Code, the film that opened the Cannes festival on Wednesday night.