Way before Elizabeth Taylor made it fashionable to go down the alter on multiple occasions, it was considered a lack of etiquette to get divorced and remarried, especially for 1930’s British Royalty. Screen Daily reports that Madonna has added the counterpart (Ewan McGregor) to the attached Vera Farmiga’s Wallis Simpson character. I originally thought this was strictly a period pic, but the film will play out as a sort of Julie & Julia, or a better example in The Hours – as it tells the parallel tales about Wallis Simpson in the 1930s and a contemporary woman called Wally Winthrop played by Abbie Cornish, who has romantic problems of her own – in addition to the fact that she’s obsessed with the Duchess of Windsor’s life.
Scripted by Madonna and Alex Keshishian, this is a biopic about the affair between King Edward VIII (McGregor) and Wallis Simpson (Farmiga) that led to the British royal abdicating from the throne to marry his divorcee lover. The King’s desire to marry a twice-divorced American with two living ex-husbands caused a constitutional crisis in the United Kingdom and the Dominions, which ultimately led to the King’s abdication in December 1936 to marry “the woman I love.” After the abdication, the former king was created Duke of Windsor by his brother George VI. Edward married Wallis six months later, after which she was formally known as the Duchess of Windsor, without the style “Her Royal Highness.”
McGregor has been extremely busy as of late with Last Word, Beginners and Jackboots on Whitehall next on slate and depending on where you’re at, you can watch him play the ballsy writer in The Ghost Writer or the balls-friendly lover in I Love You, Phillip Morris, the thesp will play King Edward VIII. Abbie Cornish recently signed up in the role of Wally “who is fascinated by what happened to Mrs Simpson, and in a way, her story mirrors certain aspects of what happened decades before.”
