Kidman, Cruz and Cotillard in tune for new musical

Updated: 07:10 EDT, 4 July 2008

Nicole Kidman has been taking singing lessons - in between preparing for the imminent arrival of her first baby - and learning lyrics, including a new number she will sing with Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard in the movie musical Nine.

Composer Maury Yeston has written three additional numbers for the film version of his stage hit about a famed Italian director who has suffered a breakdown on the set of his latest movie in Rome.

The trio of actresses will sing the new number called Take It All. Nicole will also sing a duet with Penelope called Simple, and two further songs with Daniel Day-Lewis who plays Guido, the film-maker. 

In harmony: Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard

The picture, set in 1964, starts rehearsals at Shepperton Studios in early August with Nicole playing Claudia, a British-born actress who has become an international star through working with Guido.

Marion plays his wife Luisa and Penelope his seductive mistress Carla. The third new number - Cinema Italiano - is a big dance arrangement for a Vogue journalist, a part Kate Hudson is in negotiations to play.

Judi Dench will also kick up her heels in a racy tango Folies Bergeres. Director Rob Marshall sees the film as a celebration of 'beautiful, strong, independent women.

Daniel plays an Italian man and these women have shaped him. It's about how he's hurt them, how he's helped them, how he relies on them and, ultimately, how they help him conquer his fears'.

He said that his film would not be the stage show merely planted on to celluloid.

'In a way, it's a new musical because we took the wonderful bones of what Nine was and re-shaped it as a film,' he told me.

Working with his partner John DeLuca and his long-term associate choreographers, Joey Pizzi, Denise Faye and Tara Nicole Hughes, Marshall has created some fast-paced, hip-swivelling choreography.

'There will be no dubbing,' Marshall said. 'Everyone can carry a tune and they're all having singing lessons. They're in pretty good shape, and we'll have a 60-piece orchestra in the studio when we record the songs. It's all going to be very sexy.' 

Cheap, but not so cheerful

Creature comforts: Michelle Pfeiffer

Michelle Pfeiffer's presence on the set of the movie Cherie was a bit too Hollywood for many on the production, directed by Stephen Frears, where filming has just ended.

No one fully explained to La Pfeiffer that Cherie was an independent film with a low budget and not a big Hollywood studio picture.

No one would have batted an eyelid about the actress's creature comforts on a big budget film, but on a movie the size of Cherie (tiny!), a euro on location in France had to stretch a long way.

There were a few people she liked on set, including leading man Rupert Friend, whom she got on well with, and Keira Knightley, who was visiting her beau on location.

I'm hearing good reports about the actor's performance in both Cherie and in the movie Young Victoria, a historical drama about Victoria and Albert's early courtship and marriage which has been described as being refreshingly edgy.

Chilling facts meet fiction in Ripper trilogy

An epic, £20 million-plus, three-part film series for the big screen with the Yorkshire Ripper slayings as the central backdrop starts shooting next month.

The films will show hard-boiled police investigating a series of murders: investigations that lead them into a hunt for the fiend who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper.

They will also touch on suggestions of police corruption and the perversion of justice.

David Peace's sublime but graphic northern noir novels, known as the Red Riding Quartet, have been boiled down to a trio of screenplays by Tony Grisoni.

Peace's stories, which are thoroughly researched works of fiction, hurled the reader into a dark world of murdered women and children and cruel violence - some of it involving the police.

Many die before the police cotton on to the fact that they are looking for a serial killer, or maybe two.

Peace's books - which are set in Yorkshire in the Seventies and early Eighties - are also an indictment of the political and social culture of the time.

Three directors will shoot the films, beginning with Julian Jarrold (whose new celluloid version of Brideshead Revisited opens here in September) who will direct Nineteen Seventy-Four.

James Marsh, whose entertaining movie Man On Wire won a prize at the Edinburgh International Film festival last weekend, will then shoot Nineteen Eighty, then Anand Tucker, who made the heartfelt When Did You Last See Your Father?, will direct the final picture, Nineteen Eighty-Three.

The second book - Nineteen Seventy Seven - will not be filmed, although story strands from that novel will be incorporated into the three movies.

It's a mammoth undertaking for Film 4 and Channel 4. They will produce the pictures, with Revolution Films, to be shown in cinemas first and then broadcast on Channel 4.

Another of Peace's novels, The Damned United, about Brian Clough's 44 nightmare days as manager of Leeds, has just finished filming, with Michael Sheen as Ol' Big 'Ead.

It's due for release in the autumn of next year.

And Grisoni has been very busy. He has been working with the award-winning actress Samantha Morton on a film she'll direct about her childhood in care (which I wrote about earlier this year).

The major roles for the Ripper films are being cast now, with some characters set to appear in all three movies.

Pay this professor a visit

Underrated: Richard Jenkins

Richard Jenkins's acting footprint is outsized, yet outside of the acting profession hardly anyone knows who he is.

The Visitor, which opens here today should change all that. Director and writer Tom McCarthy's movie is about Walter Vale, a widower who is a professor of economics at a Connecticut university.

He's so bored with life he takes piano lessons. Jenkins, 61, captures Walter exquisitely, giving him a hint of Death of A Salesman's Willy Loman. It's an Oscar-worthy performance.

The actor has appeared in many of the Farrelly brothers comedies, he's in the upcoming Coen brothers' film, Burn After Reading and the new Will Ferrell picture Step Brothers, and he was the spectre dad in TV drama Six Feet Under where, he noted, he played 'the only ghost who aged'.

McCarthy, who won a screen-writing Bafta for his film The Station Agent, didn't want a 'star' to play Walter; he wanted a good actor to inhabit him.

'I understand this guy,' says Jenkins, who grew up in Illinois. 'I understand reticence, not wanting to try something new. I think we all understand living in a rut.

'It's almost easier than not. I'm a little like Walter. My wife has to push me to do new things, and when she does, I'm like: "What was I waiting for?"'

Jenkins describes Walter as the kind of man who, at the beginning of the movie at least, is going to think long and hard about whether or not to vote for Barack Obama.

Indeed, for me, the film represents the change America's going through as it prepares to consider putting Obama into the White House.

The change in Walter comes about when he makes a rare visit to an apartment he keeps in Manhattan and finds it's occupied by a jewellery designer from Senegal (played by Danai Gurira) and her musician boyfriend from Syria (played by Haaz Sleiman), both illegal immigrants who were conned into renting it.

There's also drama involving the U.S. immigration service and the musician's mother (Hiam Abbass).

Pay this movie - a hit at the recent Edinburgh International Film Festival - a prompt visit.

Teenage angst and a hilarious kiss-and-tell

Gurinder Chadha lined up the young cast of her new movie Angus, Thongs And Perfect Snogging and sprinkled some Keira Knightley dust over them.

'I know we're going to have the Keira effect after the film opens,' Gurinder said at the film's recent cast and crew screening.

She was referring to her picture Bend It Like Beckham - the movie that marked Keira as a future star. 

Rising stars: Aaron Johnson and Georgia Groome in Angus, thongs And Perfect Snogging

Angus, Thongs And Perfect Snogging will certainly launch 16-year-old Georgia Groome, from Nottingham, as a star in the making.

She plays Georgia - the schoolgirl who goes 'boy-stalking' with her mates and dreams of winning the heart of the local 'sex god'.

Gurinder's film, which she wrote with husband Paul Mayeda Berges, takes on Hollywood's teenage girl genre movies, like Mean Girls and Clueless, and gives them a perfect English pitch.

It's well-paced, funny and genuinely touching. I liked Georgia telling her dad 'This isn't the Middle Ages - or the Seventies, as you call it,' or when she describes her dimwitted friend Jas as being 'half-girl, half-turnip'.

And Georgia brings tremendous honesty and humour to the screen in her role as a 14-year-old from Eastbourne who has never been kissed.

Every schoolgirl, past and present, will, I guess, recognise the DNA of this dilemma as Georgia works through a snogging scale before she stands any chance of landing Robbie, the 'hottie' in question (played winningly by Aaron Johnson).

So as not to frighten parents, Paramount Films has gently tweaked the title of Louise Rennison's brilliant novel from Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging to the safer ... And Perfect Snogging.

In any case, this isn't Blackboard Jungle: there are no knives, no one does a Juno and no one smokes skunk.

Teen angst: Georgia Groom

But the movie's still hot stuff and the rest of Georgia's cast mates, who include Eleanor Tomlinson, Sean Bourke and Kimberly Nixon, are all people the camera likes.

The teens have to endure some agonising moments on the path to blissfulness.

'I think we have it worse because boys care less,' Georgia insisted when we got on to the topic of school-yard dating.

She's probably right, although one poor lad in the film, known as Dave The Laugh, does get treated rather badly by Georgia.

Still, the 16-year-old is admirably down-to-earth in her attitude to impending stardom.

Georgia, who was a mean rugby and football player before she turned to acting, told me that she never went into showbusiness for the fame and money.

She was cast in Angus, Thongs And Perfect Snogging after making the acclaimed independent film thriller London To Brighton - all the earning from which went into a trust fund.

'I've not touched any of the money. It's in a bank and it's there till I'm 21. That's what I've decided.

'I don't need a car, because I'm not old enough to drive. I've got a phone, my iPod and a laptop. I'm lucky that I've got parents who make sure I have what I need,' Georgia told me. 'I'd rather save it till I do need it.'

Georgia, who took 12 GCSEs and next term will study three AS-level subjects, is wary of all the hype and nonsense surrounding showbusiness and said she has been shocked at how the likes of Keira Knightley are treated just because of their weight and looks.

'I'm quite happy with who I am,' Georgia told me. 'I think it must be very difficult for her [Keira] because she's naturally skinny and it's, like, just let her be! If she wasn't eating properly she couldn't keep going at the rate she does.

'You are what you are, and I'd rather be myself than try and be what I'm not.'

Angus, Thongs And Perfect Snogging has its world premiere in London on July 16 (Georgia already has her gown!) and it goes on release on July 25.

This livewire's dead busy

In demand: James Corden

James Corden was behaving outrageously one recent sunny morning. I can't even repeat the things he was saying.

I can only put his behaviour down to slaying teenage vampires in his latest film Lesbian Vampire Killers, in which he appears with fellow Gavin And Stacey star Matt Horne.

'Must have something to do with all that blood,' James said of his antics.

Now that's finished, James - one of the funniest men in Britain - has turned his attention to the TV comic sketch show he and Matt will film for BBC3, with repeats on BBC2.

Kathy Burke will direct all six episodes, with filming starting next month.

Then James and Matt take a 16-day break to join the Gavin And Stacey gang to shoot a one-hour Christmas special for BBC1 - and then go back to work with Kathy.

I remember my friend Liz Miller, one of the shrewdest people working behind the scenes in movies, telling me about James when he was in TV's Fat Friends and Mike Leigh's movie All Or Nothing, long before The History Boys came along, and that he was going to make it big one day. She was right.

Watch out for...

• Andrew Lloyd Webber, who hosts his annual private summer bash at his Sydmonton estate this weekend. Guests will be treated to a preview of some numbers from Lloyd Webber's forthcoming musical, known by some as Phantom Deux. There are unconfirmed rumours going around the West End that John Barrowman is one of several actors on a shortlist to play the phantom of the opera who, in this sequel, now resides at a Coney Island fairground. I'm told the 'Lord's' Phantom 2 score is up there with his very best. I gather Sydmonton guests will also be entertained by a rather risque burlesque show.
  

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  Super trouper: Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!

  Meryl Streep, who really is a super trouper in the very jolly Mamma Mia!. The movie opens at the Odeon, Leicester Square, today before going on general release on July 10. Expect audiences to jump up from their seats as the final credits roll and bop along to the Abba medley, which has Meryl and fellow cast members attired in silver platform boots and shiny suits, belting out numbers well into the kudos for Best Boy and Gaffer. So be warned: you've got to stay till the end! The film doesn't pretend to be anything but a laugh, although it's gently under-pinned with some serious psychological stuff. Producer Judy Craymer should be made a Dame. A dancing Dame.
  

• Kerry Ellis, the British actress who is playing the misunderstood green witch Elphaba in the musical Wicked on Broadway. Kerry will return to play the same part in the London production at the Apollo, Victoria on December 1. The actress boasts a superb voice and this is on show in a special, three song CD out on Monday called Wicked In Rock. Kerry gives two numbers from Wicked - I'm Not That Girl and Defying Gravity - a real rock vibe, and she gets into Queen's We Will Rock You. Brian May produced the disc and Foo Fighters' Taylor Hawkins is one of the 60 musicians who worked on the mini-album. It's available from Dress Circle in Covent Garden.

• The much underrated Lord Of The Rings musical at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The show will tour Europe, key UK cities, Sydney and Auckland (where Peter Jackson shot his film trilogy) late next year, and in 2010 and 2011. The epic extravaganza ends its run at the Drury Lane on July 19, so do try to catch it there. The European leg is due to start previews in Cologne, Germany, in November next year.
  

• Ralph Fiennes, who is scouting locations in Eastern Europe for a film production of Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus, which he will direct and star in with Vanessa Redgrave.
• Christain Bale, who is in complex negotiations to portray King Richard in Nottingham, Ridley Scott's revisionist version of the legend of Robin Hood. The film stars Russell Crowe as a 'good' Sheriff of Nottingham and Sienna Miller as Maid Marion. And I understand that Oscar Isaac, who played Joseph in The Nativity Story, is rumoured to be in talks to play wicked King John.
• The Zorro musical at the Garrick theatre, which hasn't got off to a good start. Previews should have started on Monday but were put back till Wednesday because the crew had major problems, one of them being that the sets are too big for the Garrick's stage and backstage areas. I hope everything is sorted by the official opening night on July 15.
• Oscar-winner Helen Mirren is rumoured to have been approached to star in the movie The Debt, a fast-paced thriller about Mossad agents who come out of retirement when they discover that a Nazi war criminal is still alive 20 years after he was was thought to have died from wounds following his kidnapping. It's a fabulous part for Helen. The film is expected to shoot later in the year from a screenplay by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, with John Madden directing.