Source:ScreenDaily.com

November 4, 2009

Screen Daily is reporting that actress Nicole Kidman will be joining "Twilight" star Robert Pattinson in Bel Ami, a biopic about 19th Century French writer Guy de Maupassant, a young man who scandalously slept his way to the top of Paris' high society in the 1890's with some of the city's most influential women.

The film will be helmed by acclaimed British theater directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of the award-winning Cheek by Jowl theater company, making their feature film directorial debut working from a script by Rachel Bennette.The film is to start shooting in London and Budapest in February of next year.

Earlier this year, Pattinson portrayed famed Spanish artist Salvador Dali in Paul Morrison's LIttle Ashes and Kidman famously played British author Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, for which she received an Oscar. One can safely presume Kidman will play one of de Maupassant's more prominent female benefactors and bedmates.

UPDATE: Gossip Cop has learned from Kidman's rep that this project is "categorically not happening for her."

(Thanks to "Mary Chan" for bringing this story to our attention.)