Kidman, Cunningham reunite for Dusty Springfield biopic

Perhaps motion picture studios have icon databases that remind them whenever the significant anniversary of an important artist’s death is on the horizon. Almost 10 years after British, blonde-beehived legend Dusty Springfield passed on from cancer, both Fox 2000 and Universal have biopics in the works.

Vulture revealed last week that The Hours author Michael Cunningham is hammering out the script for Fox, which has cast a previous conduit for his Pulitzer prize-winning words, Nicole Kidman, as the soulful singer herself. Kidman, of course, demonstrated her pop-standard abilities in Moulin Rouge. As for what else will be asked of her performance, Vulture writes:

So would the biopic include the lonely years in exile from the U.K. in Hollywood, the drinking and the drugging, and the tortured bisexual/lesbian feelings that wove through her checkered career. . .? "Yeah," [Cunningham] promised. "It's the real Dusty."

Universal has picked Tony award-winner Kristin Chenoweth, perhaps best known for playing Deputy Press Secretary Annabeth Schott on The West Wing, to star in its own Dusty movie. Chenoweth naturally looks a bit more like Dusty, but we all know Kidman’s ability to rock a prosthetic face, and as the Capote movies of aught-five and aught-six demonstrated, physicality alone does not an Academy-award winning performance make.

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