One of the world’s most sought-after stars, Keira Knightley, will have a chance to portray one of the most tragic and coveted characters in world literature, Anna Karenina.
It is not the first time Knightley is to play a Russian heroine. She has previously appeared as the charming Lara in a TV drama version of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
Shooting of the new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel is set to begin in September, directed by the author of Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, Joe Wright.
Oscar-winning British screenwriter and acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard has also been engaged in the adaptation the 800-page novel.
Tolstoy’s masterpiece has seen some 30 screen versions so far. One of the best featured Greta Garbo in a 1927 silent movie, and Vivien Leigh back in 1948.
In Soviet times, Anna Karenina also came to be brought to silver screen a couple times, a film-ballet featuring legendary ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya, among them.
The latest adaptation of Anna Karenina was created by the author of Assa, Sergey Solovyov, starring charismatic Tatiana Drubich.
Meanwhile, Wright and Stoppard earlier explained that they aim to reveal the drama of a high-society Russian family and dismiss all Tolstoy’s analytical studies of the Russian agricultural system that form a significant part of the original novel.
The director also said that he sees Anna Karenina first of all as a family drama. “It’s a family drama. War and Peace was his big political drama and Anna Karenina, as he says in the first sentence, is about families. ‘Happy families are all happy in the same way. Unhappy families are all unhappy in different ways.’ So he wrote it to be read by the new emerging literate Russian population… The actual plot of it is fairly simple and very emotional,” the director said in an interview to About.com.