The mother of all roles for Keira

Last updated at 10:26 29 September 2006


All the pieces are finally falling into place so Keira Knightley can star in a film based on a

screenplay written by her mother, the playwright Sharman Macdonald.

Keira will go before the cameras in The Best Time Of Our Lives in April, the week after Easter.

"I'm dying to do it," the actress told me when we last met on the set of Joe Wright's film

Atonement.

She said she was also excited to be working again with John Maybury, who directed her in the

movie The Jacket.

The film concerns the background to a real-life incident in 1945 involving Dylan Thomas, his wife Caitlin and another couple: Vera Phillips, who was

Thomas's childhood friend, and her husband William Killick.

Keira told me she will play the part of Vera. Maybury and the producers, Sarah Radclyffe and

Rebekah Gilbertson, are in the process of casting the other roles.

They have already contracted Alan MacDonald, who worked on Stephen Frears’ acclaimed The Queen, as production designer.

Meanwhile, Keira has finished shooting Atonement, which will be one of next year’s top pictures, and has returned to work on the third Pirates Of The Caribbean film, At World's End.

Shooting should have finished last January, but her work won't now be completed till November.

One thing's for sure: Keira has certainly moved on as an actress since she first started playing Elizabeth Swann in the Pirate pictures.

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