Perfect casting, this: after nine years and two movies experience investigating stuff in The X-Files, and venturing into a war-torn nation in The Last King of Scotland, Gillian Anderson is putting the two together to play legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn.
Gellhorn was something of a proto-Kate Adie, covering conflicts from the Spanish Civil War right up until Vietnam, and was considered one of the best war correspondents of the 20th century. The daughter of a suffragette and a gynaecologist (which so sounds like the start of a joke), Gellhorn also wrote novels, probably had an affair with HG Wells and married Ernest Hemingway, before topping herself with poison when she got old and sick.
The biopic's set to be based on Martha Gellhorn: A 20th Century Life, by Caroline Moorehead, with the screenplay to be adapted by Sharman "mother of Keira Knightley" Macdonald, who recently dealt with the women surrounding another bad boy of 20th century literature in Edge of Love. Anderson will produce as well as starring, but there's no word on a director or other cast yet. Still, as strong female roles go, this one's got potential - and at the very least, it will keep Anderson busy after The X-Files: I Want To Believe opens next month.