Kate Winslet And Saoirse Ronan To Play Lovers In Upcoming Historical Drama
Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan will star opposite each other in an upcoming historical drama but the relationship between their characters won’t be platonic. Deadline reports that Ronan and Winslet will appear in Ammonite, a film that will follow the life of famed fossil hunter Mary Anning. The movie will be set in the 1800s and we’ll see Anning in a relationship with a “London woman of means to whom she must unexpectedly play nursemaid.”
The real Mary Anning grew up in Dorset, England, a community that’s near the sea. As Britannica notes, over the course of her life, she discovered many dinosaur specimens and was one of the earliest paleontologists. The fossil hunting was something of a family business. Her parents and brother were fossil collectors as well and after Anning’s father Richard Moore died, the family survived thanks to charitable donations and the money they made from selling ancient bones.
Annings’ brother, Joseph, discovered the first known Ichthyosaurus fossil in 1810, but she excavated it and has since been credited for the find. The Ichthyosaurus was a marine reptile that roamed the seas during the Early Jurassic period. Later in 1824, she found a complete skeleton of the Plesiosaurus, another marine reptile.
Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan will play opposite each other in “Ammonite,” a period romance written by “God’s Own Country” writer/director Francis Lee: https://t.co/5QZgu4Jx0M pic.twitter.com/XLgTHFpnt7
— IndieWire (@IndieWire) December 15, 2018
Production on Ammonite is set to begin in March of 2019. As the Daily Mail points out, this is the first time that Winslet and Ronan will work together. The film will be directed by Francis Lee who directed God’s Own Country which is a gay romance about a British farmer and a Romanian immigrant worker. God’s Own Country earned a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film. Lee, who also wrote the screenplay, won Best Debut Screenwriter at the British Independent Film Awards, IndieWire notes.
Although it will be a while before Ammonite is out, fans of Winslet and Ronan can look forward to seeing them in other upcoming films. Ronan recently wrapped filming on a reboot of Little Women and is in Mary, Queen of Scots which is currently in theaters. Ronan plays the Queen of Scots herself alongside Margot Robbie who plays Queen Elizabeth.
Kate Winslet is in Avatar 2, the highly-anticipated sequel to one of the biggest movie blockbusters ever made. Director James Cameron told Vanity Fair that Winslet has a “key role.”
“She plays a character who’s part of the Sea People, the reef people” she said. “The one thing she did do is demand that she do all her own water work. I said, ‘Alright, that’s fine, we’ll have to teach you how to free dive.'”
