Most recently seen as cross-dressing assassin Isaacs in Joe Wright's "Hanna," character actor Tom Hollander is now the latest addition to Ralph Fiennes' sophomore directorial effort, an adaptation of Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens-Nelly Ternan love story, "The Invisible Woman."
Hollander will play fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, a frequent collaborator of Dickens whose play "The Frozen Deep" was the catalyst of Dickens and Ternan's first meeting — he cast her, along with her mother and one of her sisters, for a performance in Manchester.
Fiennes will play Dickens himself, with rising star Felicity Jones as Ternan and Kristin Scott Thomas as Dickens' wife Catherine. Fiennes and baby-faced Jones, you ask? Yeah, Dickens was 45 when he began his relationship with the 18-year-old Ternan, who was actually a year younger than Dickens' eldest daughter, Mary.
Fiennes will direct from a script by Abi Morgan ("Shame"), which last we heard, was still being "tweaked" and "honed" in time for production to get underway in April with an eye on a release in 2012, the year of Dickens' 200th birthday. [DailyMail]
