Felicity Jones Will Play Charles Dickens’ Mistress In Ralph Fiennes’ ‘The Invisible Woman’
Oliver Lyttelton
Felicity Jones is our kind of movie star. Not for her the route of CW shows, Maxim covers and superhero flicks; instead, she’s been doing great work on stage, British TV and even radio since her teens, gaining more and more fans as she goes, before breaking out in a big way earlier this year with the Sundance flick “Like Crazy,” which this week alone has seen her win Breakthrough Performance awards at the Gothams and from the National Board of Review, with more plaudits likely to follow.
And now, she’s moving into bigger, Hollywood pictures, but doing so by working with prestigious talent on interesting projects. Only a few weeks ago, she landed the much-contested lead role in Warren Beatty‘s long-awaited Howard Hughes film, and today brings news that she’s beaten out her contemporaries again to work with another actor-director.
Baz Bamigboye reports that Jones has landed the role of Nelly Ternan, the mistress of Charles Dickens, in “The Invisible Woman,” the adaptation of Claire Tomalin‘s acclaimed non-fiction book that Ralph Fiennes is set to make his directorial follow-up to “Coriolanus.” Ternan was an actress who was only eighteen when she began an affair with the married, 45 year old writer of “Great Expectations” and “A Christmas Carol,” and their romance scandalized society at the time.
Fiennes was considering the cream of the crop of young acting talent for the project, including Carey Mulligan, Abbie Cornish and Imogen Poots, but it’s Jones who won out, and it feels like perfect casting. While Fiennes was originally considering playing Dickens himself, last we heard he’d ruled that out, so casting the role will be the next stage for the project, penned by “Shame” and “The Iron Lady” scribe Abi Morgan. There’s no exact date for filming, but Bamigboye suggests it’ll come after Jones is wrapped on Beatty’s film, while the actress will next be seen in Toronto hit “Hysteria,” British drama “Cheerful Weather For The Wedding” and an untitled reunion with “Like Crazy” helmer Drake Doremus.
