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Holy Smoke! Actress Rebecca Ferguson creates more drama at the Vatican

Published: 20:28 EST, 14 March 2013 | Updated: 12:10 EST, 15 March 2013

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Papal power games: Rebecca Ferguson is an Italian femme fatale

With a puff of white smoke, Ridley Scott has cast model-turned-actress Rebecca Ferguson as the femme fatale for his new TV drama about power struggles at the Holy See.

The actress will play a character by the name of Countess Olivia Borghese, who is at the centre of a web of machinations in the show, called The Vatican.

Other roles will be played by Anna Friel (so good in Michael Winter- bottom’s new film The Look Of Love), Kyle Chandler, Matthew Goode, Sebastian Koch — and Bruno Ganz as the Vicar of Christ himself.

Scott, who made Alien, Gladiator and last year’s Prometheus, will shoot the pilot episode of The Vatican on locations in Rome and New York next month for the Showtime network, the U.S. channel behind the award-winning Homeland series.

Meanwhile, Rebecca will be seen on BBC1 from July in the ten-part mega-drama The White Queen, based on Philippa Gregory’s novels about the women at the heart of the War Of The Roses.

She plays Elizabeth Woodville, a widowed Lancastrian who falls in love with Edward IV, a member of the House of York, played by fast- rising acting heartthrob Max Irons.

The White Queen, based on Ms Gregory’s The Cousins’ War novels, also features Janet McTeer, Aneurin Barnard, Eleanor Tomlinson, James Frain and Amanda Hale.

It’s a joint production between the BBC and the American Starz channel.

Over Pimm’s cocktails and pigs in blankets at the British Consul General’s Oscar party in LA (actually, along with the Charles Finch-Chanel ‘do’, it was one of the best bashes over the Oscar week), someone connected to The White Queen let slip that there are two versions of the series.

One, for U.S. consumption, has ‘more bang for their bucks’ than the version we’ll see on BBC1.

I asked the person who told me this to put down his drink and be more specific.

‘The Americans will see more action in the bedroom,’ he said.

I asked the drama’s spokeswoman whether the ‘septic tanks’ would be treated to more sex scenes than us and she replied thus: ‘The Americans are getting a couple of extended scenes that won’t be shown on the BBC.

One of the scenes is at the French court, which was quite rowdy, but it’s only 30 seconds more in each case. It’s not that different at all.’

Return of a real super-trouper

Star: Donna in Can-Can in 1988 with Milo O'Shea

There was once a headline about Donna McKechnie which described her as a ‘trouper who keeps trekking’.

I thought it fit her to a tee, because the dancer-actor-singer hasn’t stopped working since she made her debut on Broadway in the early 1960s, in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.

Donna is heading our way to play The Crazy Coqs cabaret at the Brasserie Zedel in Piccadilly (a stone’s throw from Viva Forever at the Piccadilly Theatre) from April 2 through April 6.

She calls her show, which opened last month in Below 54 (site of New York’s infamous Studio 54), Same Place: Another Time.

‘It’s about trying to find my way to love and life in New York City,’ she said. ‘A lot revolved for a time around Studio 54. I remember people like Michael Caine being there — every night, it seemed.’

She’ll sing a lot of songs that evoke the spirit of New York; offerings from people like Jim Croce, Peter Allen, Stephen Sondheim and Billy Strayhorn. Donna will also be remembering Marvin Hamlisch, who worked with her early on, and later wrote the score for the landmark musical A Chorus Line.

Donna created the role of Cassie, a part she relates to ‘emotionally, not literally’, because she’s not Cassie as most assume. She’s more like Maggie, the dancer who grew up loving The Red Shoes.

At Crazy Coqs, Donna will sing the Chorus Line number At The Ballet in memory of Marvin.
And she’ll also be going to see A Chorus Line at the Palladium.

She’ll even try to do some steps on the Crazy Coqs’ postage stamp-sized stage.

‘I call it dance illusion,’ she confided. ‘I’ll dance down the aisles, if I have to.’

Sam Taylor-Johnson sent emails, flew to Los Angeles and did everything she could to ensure Sony hired her to direct a film version of Robert Goolrick’s bestselling novel A Reliable Wife.

‘Oh, I had to fly over and stalk them,’ Sam told me. The movie is set in 1890s Wisconsin, and is about a wealthy widower who advertises for a ‘reliable wife’.

It becomes a tale involving two men and a woman. ‘It’s Gothic, and a thriller,’ Sam said.

There’s no casting yet, but she will think it over while she spends the next few months in Vancouver, where her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson is starring in the new version of Godzilla, alongside Juliette Binoche, Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen.

‘They have a great cast, and while Godzilla’s filming, I’ll be working on my film with the screenwriter, and we’ll put our cast together,’ Sam said.

Watch out for...

Simon Russell Beale and John Simm who are the powerful pairing put together by director Jamie Lloyd for the second of his productions for his Trafalgar Transformed season at the Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall.

In association with the Ambassador Theatre Group, Lloyd will be putting on four plays.

The first, Macbeth, is currently running with James McAvoy and Claire Foy.

Simon Russell Beale and John Simm will appear during the Jamie Lloyd's Trafalgar Transformed Season

Next up, from May 4, will be Harold Pinter’s steaming The Hothouse.

The play is set in a state institution and Pinter observes how power corrupts and corrodes the petty-minded institute manager Roote (Beale). Simm plays Gibbs, the man who rattles Roote’s cage.

Judi Dench who gives a masterclass in how to command a stage in John Logan’s Peter And Alice, the second play in the Michael Grandage season at the Noel Coward Theatre.

Judi portrays Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for the Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass, and she gets to meet Peter Llewelyn Davies (played by Ben Whishaw),the model for J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Both explore the notion of living with an enduring celebrity that neither asked for, but both use out of a desperate necessity.

Life for those in the spotlight is not all as ‘happily ever after’ as some assume.