After Simone Veil, Elsa Zylberstein will play Simone de Beauvoir in the film written by Oscar-winning British playwright Christopher Hampton and directed by Anne Fontaine, according to Variety. The film, adapted from Simone de Beauvoir’s book Letters to Nelson Algren, will evoke the passionate romance between the novelist and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer Nelson Algren.
The book, to which Elsa Zylberstein, also co-producer of the film, obtained the rights, brings together the hundreds of love letters that Simone de Beauvoir sent to her lover during the years of their affair, from 1947 to 1964. Filming will take place between Chicago and Paris. “I was stunned by the beauty of these letters and this relationship that began in the most unexpected way after Simone de Beauvoir’s trip to Chicago for two days,” the actress told our Variety colleagues.
“Simone de Beauvoir was not an austere intellectual; she was a very passionate and daring woman, who was in love with two men, Jean-Paul Sartre and Nelson Algren. With Christopher Hampton and Anne Fontaine, we have the ambition to make a great film that will be both classic and sensual and that will have longevity, “she continued. The biopic dedicated to Simone Veil, released in October 2022, joined the closed club of French films having exceeded two million admissions. Directed by Olivier Dahan, the film retraces all of his exceptional destiny through the 20th century, from childhood to the end. Today, Elsa Zylberstein is embarking on production, alongside her acting career. During an interview granted last February, always to Variety, the actress revealed that she is developing a series of films and series, in particular in collaboration with Feras Fayyad, nominated for the 2020 Oscars for the documentary The Cave.
With the Syrian filmmaker directing, she plans to tackle a new biopic dedicated to Élise Boghossian, a French acupuncturist and humanitarian worker who went to Jordan and northern Iraq to treat civilian populations and refugee victims of the war. An adventure that she recounted in an autobiographical book In the kingdom of hope, there is no winter, on which Ted Braun will rely for the screenplay.
