Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, James Corden Cast In Film Version Of ‘Cats’Posted by Wilson Morales
July 20, 2018
Source: Daily Mail
Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, James Corden and Ian McKellen have been cast in Working Title’s upcoming movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash musical “Cats.”
Tom Hooper, the Oscar-winning director of “The King’s Speech,” will direct “Cats,” which is set to begin shooting in Britain in November. The screenplay by Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”) is based on Lloyd Webber’s musical, which was itself adapted from a book of children’s poems by T.S. Eliot.
Hudson, who won an Oscar in 2007 for her breakout role in “Dreamgirls,” will play Grizabella, the former “glamour cat” who falls on hard times and gets to sing about it in showstopper “Memory.” It’s unclear which roles will be played by Swift, Corden and McKellen.
“Cats” is one of the most successful musicals in history, enjoying long runs both in London’s West End and on Broadway. The possibility of a movie version has long been bandied about.
Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which was published in 1939, is a collection of poems about creatures known as “Jellicle cats” and their secret world, but lacks an overarching story line. Lloyd Webber’s musical stitches the poems together into a tale of cats seeking some sort of feline redemption in the made-up “Heaviside layer” above London, “up, up, up past the Russell Hotel.”
