‘No one plays Elizabeth Taylor until I’m dead’

As Elizabeth Taylor was buried yesterday at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, the same cemetery where her close friend Michael Jackson was laid to rest 18 months ago, the discussion was moving on to Hollywood's latest $64,000 question: which contemporary actress who will get to portray her in a biopic?

Last year it was reported that Angelina Jolie and Catherine Zeta-Jones were vying to play Taylor in a film about her long-running love affair and two marriages to fellow actor Richard Burton. The movie was to be based on Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger's book Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century.

Mike Nichols - who directed the husband and wife in the 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which Taylor won her second Oscar - would apparently direct.

Taylor swiftly quashed the idea of a movie about her notorious relationship with Burton, at least in her lifetime. She tweeted in July: "Hold your horses world. I've been hearing all kinds of rumours about someone being cast to play me in a film about Richard and myself."

She went on to declare: "No one is going to play Elizabeth Taylor, but Elizabeth Taylor herself. Not at least until I'm dead, and at the moment I'm having too much fun being alive... and I plan on staying that way. Happiness to all."

Angelina Jolie also denied the rumour, reportedly saying "no one could play Liz Taylor but herself".

Jolie will no doubt be sticking to this mantra if she takes the role of Cleopatra in a new film about the Egyptian queen. Producer Scott Rudin has stressed that the movie, which is based on Stacy Schiff's bestselling book Cleopatra: A Life, will be very different from Elizabeth Taylor's 1963 film.

Rudin says the film will also focus on Cleopatra the warrior and politician, as much as the seductress portrayed by Taylor in one of her most famous roles.

It was also reported yesterday that David Fincher could direct the Cleopatra movie. He is the third director to be linked with the film, after James Cameron and Paul Greengrass were unavailable. ·