Middle Age Hollywood

Actor tipped to return to the big screen as Egypt's best-known queen. But will Brad Pitt play Mark Antony?

Angelina Jolie is to star in a new film about the life of the queen of the Nile, adapted from the forthcoming biography, Cleopatra: A Life, by Pulitzer prize-winner Stacy Schiff. The book isn't published until the autumn, but producer Scott Rudin has already secured the rights, with Jolie pencilled in as the lead. "The movie is being developed for and with Jolie," said a spokesperson for Rudin.

Schiff has endorsed the casting, and given the nod to the possibility of Jolie's real-life partner, Brad Pitt, playing Mark Antony, in what would be an echo of the 1963 film Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Joseph L Mankiewicz's blockbuster set the record for the most expensive film ever shot at the time, with a final budget of $44m.

The story of Cleopatra has also been the subject of at least a dozen other films, including four silent movies (in 1910, 1912, 1913 and 1917), a 1920 cartoon, a 1934 Cecil B DeMille romance, and productions from Brazil, Czechoslovakia and Egypt itself.

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