Rooney Mara is set to play Audrey Hepburn in a new biopic of the Breakfast at Tiffany’s actor. The film will be directed by Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director best known for the Oscar-nominated Call Me By Your Name, as well as for A Bigger Splash and his remake of Suspiria.

It will be written by Michael Mitnick, who collaborated with Guadagnino on 2019 short The Staggering Girl, and who also has a biopic about Jim Henson in production.

Hepburn’s elegant performances in films such as Roman Holiday, Sabrina and My Fair Lady, coupled with her iconic image, have meant she has remained in the public consciousness for almost 30 years since her death in 1993, aged 63.

Born in 1929 to a Dutch baroness and a British diplomat, she spent much of her adolescence under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands under an assumed Dutch name, fearful of appearing English. However, she also performed in dance recitals to fundraise for the resistance and transferred messages in her ballet shoes.

After training as a dancer, she was spotted in 1950 on a beach in Monaco by the French author Colette, who cast her as the lead in the Broadway transfer of her novella Gigi.

Two years later, Hepburn won an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe for Roman Holiday, beginning a remarkably successful screen career – from which she largely retired 14 years later, to raise her family and work for Unicef.

Mara, 36, was Oscar-nominated for her role in Todd Haynes’s romance Carol, and also starred in David Fincher’s remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Lion, Her and Mary Magdalene. - The Guardian