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Langella to bring Nixon role to big screen
2007-04-30
Actor Frank Langella has agreed to bring his acclaimed stage role as Richard Nixon to the screen for an upcoming film version of the play about the Nixon's famed 1977 TV interviews with David Frost. Langella, currently portraying the disgraced former president in the Broadway production of "Frost/Nixon," was offered the movie part last week and is in negotiations to finalize the deal, his spokeswoman said on Monday. The movie is set to begin shooting in late August, with Oscar-winning filmmaker Ron Howard directing from a script adapted by Peter Morgan from his own stage play, according to a spokeswoman for its distributor, Universal Pictures. Actor Michael Sheen also is in talks to recreate his stage role opposite Langella as the British talk show host who paid Nixon $600,000 for a series of exclusive interviews three years after he left office in disgrace over the Watergate scandal. Howard's choice of Langella capped weeks of rumors in Hollywood about who would play Nixon on screen, with such names as Warren Beatty, Tom Hanks and Kevin Spacey surfacing as possibilities, according to Daily Variety. Nixon became the only U.S. president ever to resign when he stepped down on August 9, 1974, to avoid impeachment for his role in a cover-up of the politically motivated burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington The Nixon-Frost interviews, which unfolded as a kind of cat-and-mouse exchange between the two men, were capped by Nixon's admission that he had "let the American people down" and his declaration that "when the president does it that means that is not illegal." Langella's performance in "Frost/Nixon," which ran in London's West End before opening last weekend to rave reviews on Broadway, earned the actor nominations for the annual Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. "Frost/Nixon" would be Morgan's third feature film focusing on modern historical figures, following last year's "The Last King of Scotland" about Ugandan ruler Idi Amin and "The Queen," about Britain's Queen Elizabeth. That film earned him an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.
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