Cannes star Rachel Weisz in line to play Hedy Lamarr

The English-born movie actress Rachel Weisz is looking more and more like a Hollywood star of the old school. Her latest film is a sword and sandals epic set in Egypt, in 400AD, called Agora, which premieres at the Cannes film festival, opening today on the Cote d'Azur.

Weisz plays Hypatia, the astronomer, mathematician and pagan philosopher. She was one of world's earliest feminist heroines, who met a grisly end at the hands of Christian monks in the streets of Alexandria. The film is directed by Alejandro Amenabar, the Spaniard behind Nicole Kidman's 2001 horror film The Others, who says he wants audiences "to see, feel and smell a remote civilization as if it were as real as today".

Max Minghella, the 23-year-old son of the late director Anthony Minghella, plays the slave who fell in love with her. As one Cannes regular put it: "They don't make films like this any more." Indeed, it's the sort of film Cecil B DeMille might have made with Hedy Lamarr in the title role back in the Forties.

Which makes the latest news from Cannes even more enticing: that Weisz is being mooted to play Hedy Lamarr herself in a biopic to be made by Robert Redford's director daughter, Amy Redford.

Lamarr was one of Hollywood's great beauties - many have said the most beautiful actress of all time. Born in Vienna, she arrived in LA in the 1930s as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler having made her name in the Czechoslovakian film Ekstase (or Ecstasy), in which she played the young wife of an indifferent older husband. Close-ups of her simulating orgasm - not exactly the norm in those days - made the film notorious.

Renamed Hedy Lamarr and signed to MGM by Louis B Mayer, she was to become one of Tinseltown's biggest wartime stars. She played opposite Charles Boyer in Algiers, teamed up with Lana Turner and Judy Garland in the musical Ziegfeld Girl, and starred with Victor Mature in DeMille's epic Samson and Delilah.

Amy Redford's film, Face Value, however, will not dwell on Lamarr the Hollywood beauty - nor her six marriages - but on Lamarr the scientist.

Working with the avant garde composer George Antheil, Lamarr helped create - and patent - a method of changing frequencies, known as frequency-hopping, that would enable the military to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to jam. It doesn't sound like the sort of thing a 1940s Hollywood goddess would do in her spare time, but it is true.

Weisz fans who cannot make it to Cannes, or wait for Face Value, should pay a visit to The Little Black Gallery in Chelsea. Here they find her photographed by the late Bob Carlos Clarke, poured into black latex. ·