Rachel Weisz to play Jackie Kennedy in new film

Fresh from her triumph at the Olivier Awards where she won best actress for her role as Blanche Dubois in last year's West End revival of A Streetcare Named Desire, the English actress Rachel Weisz is being mooted for the role of Jackie Kennedy in a hot new film project.

Entertainment Weekly online claims she is to play Jackie in a biopic that follows the former American first lady during the period between her husband President Jack Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and his burial at Arlington Cemetery three days later. As EW.com puts it, the film will show Jackie at both her most vulnerable and her most graceful.

The script is by Noah Oppenheim and is a hot property in Hollywood, where it has previously been mentioned in the same breath as the name Steven Spielberg. However, it now seems Spielberg is not connected and instead Darren Aronofsky - Weisz's fiancee - is directing and producing.

New Yorker Aronofsky is best known for directing the Bafta-winning Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and Weisz and Hugh Jackman in The Fountain. He can also lay claim to being one of the most unpopular men in the world: earlier this year Weisz was voted "the woman most men want to marry" by readers of Esquire magazine, and Aranofsky is the man with whom she has agreed to tie the knot.

Weisz's many fans, meanwhile, can see her in her latest movie, Agora (above), which opens in Britain on April 23. As she revealed at the Cannes film festival last year, she did not ask for a 'body double' for Agora's nude scene, feeling 'fit' enough to do the job herself. ·