Nicole Kidman will portray 1930s painter in a true-life film titled “The Danish Girl.”
Tomas Alfredson (“Let the Right One In”) will direct the movie about Danish painter Einar Wegener who became the first person to go through a sex-change operation to become a woman.
He underwent several operations in Berlin in 1930 and took the name Lili Elbe. She was thought to be intersexual, with both male and female organs found in her body during surgeries.
Lili Elbe died aged 49 in 1931, after complications following a fifth operation in which doctors attempted to transplant a uterus into her body. Elbe had hoped to become a mother, after accepting a proposal of marriage.
Charlize Theron, who had been attached to play Wegener’s wife, the fashion illustrator Gerda Gottlieb Wegener Porta, has left the production.
Swedish director Alfredson said he planned to shoot “The Danish Girl” before his previously announced John le Carre adaptation, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”
“We have been in talks for close to a year, and we are soon going into production,” said Alfredson.
Kidman, who won an Oscar for taking on the physical characteristics of British author Virginia Woolf in “The Hours,” and Per Saari, who is head of Kidman’s Fox-based Blossom Films company, will produce the movie.
