Oscar winner Rachel Weisz will play Oscar-winner Elizabeth Taylor in See-Saw Films’ A Special Relationship, exploring Taylor’s journey from actress to activist.
The story will be told through the lens of Taylor’s friendship with her assistant Roger Wall. Based on the screenplay written by Oscar -winner Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”), the upcoming production will be helmed by the female directing duo Bert&Bertie (“Troop Zero”).
The feature is produced by See-Saw Films’ Iain Canning and Emile Sherman (“The King’s Speech”). Simon Gillis, See-Saw’s chief operating officer of film, and former Studiocanal exec Danny Perkins are executive producing along with Barbara Berkowitz and Tim Mendelson, who are trustees of the Elizabeth Taylor Estate-House of Taylor Trust.
Taylor won Oscars for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Butterfield 8” and was nominated a total of five times.
Though famous for her glamorous lifestyle and multiple marriages, she also took a crusading role in the fight against AIDS, which stemmed from her hiring of Walls, a gay man who grew up in poverty in the homophobic Deep South, in the mid-1980s.