Anne Hathaway is heading to the small screen, joining the ranks of other Oscar-winning A-Listers like Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. The “Les Misérables” actress will star in “The Ambassador’s Wife,” a limited TV series from The Mark Gardon Company and Entertainment One (eOne).
Hathaway, who first stepped into the producer’s chair for the 2014 romantic drama “Song One,” will also produce the series, an adaptation of Jennifer Steil’s newly released novel of the same name.
Steil drew from her own experiences as the wife of the British ambassador to Yemen to write “The Ambassador’s Wife,” a harrowing tale of an American woman — an ambassador’s wife — kidnapped in the Middle East.
This won’t be Hathaway’s first time on television. In 2010, she won an Emmy for voicing Princess Penelope in “The Simpsons.” And way back when — around the turn of the millennium — Hathaway starred as a series regular on Fox’s family dramedy “Get Real” (Jesse Eisenberg played her little brother). “The Ambassador’s Wife” marks Hathaway’s first major TV role since her breakout performance in 2001’s “The Princess Diaries” launched her film career.
“’The Ambassador’s Wife’ is an incredible story that pulls you in immediately and resonates with all of us based on the images and news headlines that are pervasive in our lives today,” said producer Gordon in a statement. “We are so fortunate to have Anne starring in this timely, gripping and compassionate drama. She is in a league all her own, and we cannot think of anyone who can better portray Steil’s complex heroine.”
Here’s the synopsis for Steil’s book:
From a real-life ambassador’s wife comes a harrowing novel about the kidnapping of an American woman in the Middle East and the heartbreaking choices she and her husband each must make in the hope of being reunited.
When bohemian artist Miranda falls in love with Finn, the British ambassador to an Arab country, she finds herself thrust into a life for which she has no preparation. The couple and their toddler daughter live in a stately mansion with a staff to meet their every need, but for Miranda even this luxury comes at a price: the loss of freedom. Trailed everywhere by bodyguards to protect her from the dangers of a country wracked by civil war and forced to give up work she loves, she finds her world shattered when she is taken hostage, an act of terror with wide-reaching consequences.
Diplomatic life is a far cry from Miranda’s first years in Mazrooq, which were spent painting and mentoring a group of young Muslim women, teaching them to draw in ways forbidden in their culture. As the novel weaves together past and present, we come to see how Finn and Miranda’s idealism and secrets they have each sought to hide have placed them and those who trust them in peril. And when Miranda grows close to a child who shares her captivity, it is not clear that even being set free would restore the simple happiness that once was hers and Finn’s. Suspenseful and moving, The Ambassador’s Wife is a story of love, marriage, and friendship tested by impossible choices.
[via The Hollywood Reporter and TheWrap]
