I don’t know how we missed this, but we did! Better late than never…
She’s already played one pioneering black entertainer on film (specifically, Nina Simone), although the future of that film remains unknown; and now Zoe Saldana is reportedly in talks to play Eartha Kitt in a biopic on the life of the singer, actress, dancer and activist, perhaps best known for her highly distinctive voice, who the late, great Orson Welles (who gave Kitt her first starring role, as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr. Faustus) once called the “most exciting woman in the world.”
Indeed.
A star of stage and screen, with a career that spanned about 60 years, fans will remember when she took over for Julie Newmar and played Catwoman decades before Halle Berry did in that horrendous 2004 movie that many of us would like to forget ever happened.
The multiple award-winning performer died from colon cancer on Christmas Day, December 25, 2008, at her home in Weston, Connecticut.
6 years later, Zoe Saldana is apparently set to portray the lead role in a biopic about the Kitt, according various sources, including Huffington Post, Hollywood.com, Broadway World, MSN Entertainment and others.
The movie is expected to focus on Kitt’s rise to fame through the late 1960s, considered her “peak years,” including her very vocal opposition to the war in Vietnam, which, some say, derailed her career.
Unfortunately none of the above sources seems to know who’s behind the project (director, producer, production company, etc), so we’ll just have to file this one away as an unconfirmed rumor. Although, I recall when we first reported on the news about Saldana starring as Nina Simone, that was also an “unconfirmed rumor.”
Zoe Saldana has certainly been in demand, since co-starring in the biggest box-office hit of all time, Avatar. From 2009’s Star Trek reboot, to her starring role as action hero in Colombiana, appearing in the Christian Bale drama Out of the Furnace, and with Bradley Cooper in The Words, with upcoming projects including Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Blood Ties and of course starring as Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic. She’s also co-starring in Don Cheadle’s long-in-development Miles Davis project (although no word on what character she’s signed up to play), and, last year, with her sister Cisely Saldana, inked a first-look deal (via their production company Saldana Productions) with Lionsgate studios. Most recently, she was cast as the lead in NBC’s four-hour miniseries adaptation of Ira Levin’s 1967 best-selling suspense novel Rosemary’s Baby – a novel that was also the basis for Roman Polanski’s 1968 film of the same name, which starred Mia Farrow as the title character.
Stay tuned…
