A Titanic couple: Kate and Leonardo reunited in new film

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Published: 24 March 2007
A decade after they played a happy but doomed couple in Titanic, Hollywood's most lucrative film, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio will act opposite each other again.

But in their new film, announced yesterday, they play a couple whose unsatisfactory marriage is crumbling - under the direction of Winslet's husband in real life, Sam Mendes.

The film, Revolutionary Road, is based on a 1961 novel by the American writer Richard Yates, which tells the story of two Connecticut suburbanites, Frank and April Wheeler. It has been developed by BBC Films and Neal Street Productions, the company that Mendes cofounded after leaving the Donmar Warehouse theatre. It is being backed by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks.

Winslet, 31, read the script some time ago and liked it, her representative said yesterday. Mendes, 41, whose work with DreamWorks stretches back to his first, Oscar-winning film American Beauty, had long had it in his diary to direct next year. But the entire project will now be filmed in 11 weeks' time in the US after the deal to bring DiCaprio, 32, on board was agreed with a flurry of calls in the past fortnight.

David Thompson, the head of BBC Films, said: \"You dream about these things and occasionally they all come good. It's fantastic about the casting. We've assembled a team beyond our wildest dreams.

\"There's an enormous excitement because Kate and Leo haven't worked together since Titanic and they're both at the top of their game. But this film is on a different emotional plane. It's a searing drama.\"

Winslet will play April, who has ambitions to be an actor, while DiCaprio will play her husband, who endures a futile corporate job with the assistance of too much drink and the distraction of an office affair.

The BBC bought the rights to the book, released in the same year as Catch-22, more than three years ago. The screenplay is by Justin Haythe, the British writer behind The Clearing, starring Robert Redford and Helen Mirren.

\"It's a remarkable book with an incredibly powerful love story,\" Mr Thompson said. \"To be working with such outstanding talent from both sides of the Atlantic is particularly exciting,\" he added. \"It is very much in line with our strategy of attracting world-class talent to BBC Films projects as well as giving opportunities to new talent.\"

Recent BBC projects include Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor in Miss Potter, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal and Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane.

Other films completed or in production include Catherine Zeta-Jones and Guy Pearce in the Houdini film Death Defying Acts, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johannson in The Other Boleyn Girl, from the Philippa Gregory novel, and Naomi Watts and Viggo Mortensen in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises.

\"It's an amazing array of stars and what's drawing them in is there's a surprising shortage of challenging and interesting scripts in Hollywood,\" Mr Thompson said.

\"We're not going to turn into a mini version of a Hollywood studio, but we're very interested in pulling this kind of talent in because people want to see them.\"

Yet it also has some all-British productions on the go, including a forthcoming re-make of Brideshead Revisited with Matthew Goode, who grabbed attention in Woody Allen's Match Point, Ben Whishaw, from Perfume, and Hayley Atwell, who was in the TV adaptation of The Line of Beauty.