Nicole Kidman to play Princess Grace in new film

We learnt today from Ben Child’s film column in the Guardian that Nicole Kidman will be playing Grace Kelly in a new Hollywood blockbuster. The film will be directed by Olivier Dahan whose biopic of Edith Piaf was received well by the critics and saw that Marion Cottilard won Best Actress at the Oscars in 2008.

The British Pathe archive has a wealth of great Grace Kelly newsreels and archive video footage, including some quite intimate ones when Pathe were given access to her private family life in Monaco.

You can see some of the best Grace Kelly reels here:

GRACE KELLY VIDEO ARCHIVE

Also, on our YouTube channel VintageFashions you can watch this great clip of Grace Kelly modelling as a student in this video 1940s Evening Fashions:

 

Do you think Nicole Kidman will be good in the role as Grace? The Australian actress certainly knows how to flick between between partygirl and austere – as we saw in Moulin Rouge, and Nicole Kidman has strawberry blonde hair like Grace.

Finally – we wonder if the new film will make use of some archive footage? We hope so!

British Pathé does the Cannes Cannes

Leading Ladies: the Sirens of Cannes

Today Twitter has been ablaze with talk of the Cannes Film Festival 2010. The Guardian have been commenting on this year’s “strong Asian and Russian presence”, others have been losing sleep over this Icelandic plume of volcanic ash which will have a devastating effect on the turn-out to this year’s festival and therefore the entire film industry (apparently). And once again Cameron Diaz has been pulled out of the press cookie jar with that timeless quotation – “So where is the Cannes film festival this year?”

To be timely, and since the sun is shining today in London,we thought we’d bunch together some of our rarest Cannes material from the archive for you. And yes – we do have heaps of it! From the very first Cannes festival in 1946 to the private villas parties of the 1960s stars – British Pathé were there documenting everything as furiously as you’d expect from the 20^th century’s leading newsreel makers.

In this special Cannes archive that we’ve pieced together for you today you can enjoy rare clips of directors like Luc-Godard and Hitchcock; spy on famous actresses of the day like Sophia Loren or Jeanne Moreau; there’s ace beach footage and poolside gossip too, not to mention the Cannes street carnivals and red carpet arrivals. Why not pour yourself a Martini and sit back with some of this great archive footage of Cannes, the world’s most loved film festival.

The stars arrive at the first ever Cannes Film Festival