Grammy winner Billie Eilish is set to make her movie debut in an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar.
The adaptation will be written and directed by Sarah Polley, who won the Oscar for best screenplay for the 2022 film Women Talking, according to Deadline.
Polley also wrote the 2017 limited series Alias Grace and played herself in an episode of Apple TV’s The Studio.
The film will be produced by Joy Gorman Wettels, Plan B Entertainment and StudioCanal, with Focus Features set to distribute it.
This will be Eilish’s first film role. She played women’s empowerment cult leader Eva in Swarm, a 2023 satirical miniseries about a woman whose obsession with a pop star takes her down a dark path. She won the people’s choice award for TV performance of the year for it.
The Bell Jar, first published in 1963, is the only novel by American poet Sylvia Plath. It follows Esther Greenwood, a gifted student who wins a prestigious internship at a New York fashion magazine, but gradually descends into depression as she struggles with identity as well as societal expectations for women and her own ambitions.
The novel, widely considered semi-autobiographical, draws heavily on Plath’s own experiences with mental illness. She died by suicide a month after its publication in the UK.
Previous attempts to bring The Bell Jar to the screen have had mixed success. It was adapted in a 1979 film, directed by Larry Peerce and starring Marilyn Hassett as Esther Greenwood, though it received little critical attention.
In 2016, a project meant to be Kirsten Dunst’s feature directorial debut with Dakota Fanning set to star as Esther was announced, but ultimately shelved.
Dunst told Entertainment Weekly in 2019 that she never owned the rights, “so it went away for me”.
Eilish is the first artist to win the Grammy for song of the year three times and is a 10-time Grammy winner overall.
She has also won two Academy Awards for best original song, for “No Time to Die” from the 2021 James Bond film of the same name and for “What Was I Made For?” from the 2023 hit Barbie.
A 3D concert documentary, Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft, directed by James Cameron is also expected in theatres in May this year.
At the WSJ Magazine Innovator Awards last year, Eilish urged the world’s billionaires to give away their wealth.
“We’re in a time right now where the world is really, really bad and really dark and people need empathy and help more than, kind of, ever, especially in our country,” she told a gathering which included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Star Wars director George Lucas.
“I’d say if you have money, it would be great to use it for good things, maybe give it to some people that need it.”
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