Jennifer Lawrence, who received her fourth Oscar nomination, is attached to portray Marita Lorenz in Marita, a hot pitch from Eric Warren Singer, co-writer of American Hustle.
Along with writing American Hustle and Red Sparrow, Singer also wrote the script for 2009’s The International.
Sony Pictures picked up the project from the Oscar-nominated scribe. Matt Tolmach will produce the romantic spy drama with Lawrence and Scott Mednick. Andre Rouleau is also producing.
Marita centers on Lorenz and how she met and began an affair with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1959 when she was 19 years old. After becoming pregnant and having an abortion, Lorenz left Cuba and joined anti-communists in the U.S., where she was recruited by the CIA for an assassination mission. In 1960, she returned to Cuba to carry out the mission but yielded to love.
Lorenz also had an affair with a Venezuelan dictator, claimed to have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and spied on diplomats for the FBI in the 1970s. She wrote two autobiographies and lives in Maryland.
Singer developed the project, working with Mednick and Rouleau, before bringing it to Lawrence, with whom he worked on Hustle, and taking it out to the town.
Cuba has been heating up as a story setting and possible shooting location since the embargoes were eased by President Barack Obama.
Lawrence won a Golden Globe for her role as the housewife-turned-inventor in David O. Russell’s Joy, along with receiving an Oscar nomination. The Hunger Games actress, who will next be seen in X-Men: Apocalypse, is set to star in Darren Aronofsky’s untitled project for Paramount with Javier Bardem.
She is attached to Steven Spielberg’s film It’s What I Do, the story of a female war photographer. Lawrence recently completed Sony’s sci-fi love drama Passengers.
