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Jennifer Lawrence Will Play Jazz-Age Icon Zelda Fitzgerald In New Biopic

By Amy Feinstein
Published on: 14:43 PST, Oct 22, 2016

Calling all Great Gatsby fans, Jennifer Lawrence is partnering with director Ron Howard on a new Zelda Fitzgerald biopic. The project, currently called Zelda, is based on a screenplay by Emma Frost, and will examine the often-troubled relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife and muse, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.

Stories of Jazz-Age icons are once again in vogue, as stories that include Fitzgerald and Hemingway are being made into books and movies, says the Inquisitr. Recently, the movie Genius was released to great acclaim, as it was the story of literary editor Max Perkins, who championed writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. The movie, which stars Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth, was author A. Scott Berg’s Princeton thesis brought to life.

The role of Zelda Fitzgerald would be a dream role for any actress, as Zelda was a woman who combined an incredible zest for life with alcoholism and mental illness to create what some would describe as a human hurricane. Jennifer Lawrence is eager to play the former debutante, born in Montgomery, Alabama, who was dubbed “the first Flapper” by her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, says the Hollywood Reporter. The screenplay is based on Nancy Milford’s biography, Zelda, and will portray Zelda Fitzgerald through her younger years and mental illness.

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The Huffington Post says that it will be a challenge for someone as cool and self-deprecating as Jennifer Lawrence to play the complex Zelda Fitzgerald. The recent remake of the film version of The Great Gatsby introduced a new generation to the Jazz Age characters of Fitzgerald’s best-known and much-loved novel, which featured a fictionalized version of Zelda Fitzgerald in Daisy Buchanan.

The characters of Tom and Daisy had much in common with Scott and Zelda, as lines from the novel indicate.

“They were careless people […] they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Bits of Zelda Fitzgerald can also be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night as Nicole Diver, the woman we first meet as a fragile mental patient who marries a Johns Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, and as she grows stronger, he becomes more needy. Zelda Fitzgerald was always seeking an outlet for her own creative urges. As an adult, she picked up ballet, writing, and painting, and some level of competition always existed between the two.

AL.com says that one of these art forms is now on display at the Birmingham Museum of Art, where a painting by Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is on display. Zelda was “a skilled artist” particularly in watercolors, but she was always overshadowed by her husband Scott.

In 1934, Zelda Fitzgerald had a show of her paintings and drawings in New York that was covered by the New Yorker, who had been critical of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald; with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so-called Jazz Age.

The painting at the Birmingham Museum of Art is of the home of Fitzgerald’s literary agent, Harold Ober, who took over raising Scott and Zelda’s daughter, Scottie, when Scott and Zelda sunk into mental illness and alcoholism. The painting had belonged to Scottie Fitzgerald, who gave it to her Alabama physician, Dr. Jane M. Day, in 1985. Recently it was donated to the museum.

Do you think Jennifer Lawrence will make a good Zelda Fitzgerald?

[Featured Image by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images]

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