‘Maria’: Read The Screenplay By Steven Knight That Became The Libretto For Angelina Jolie’s Opera Icon

deadline.com:

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the year’s buzziest awards-season films continues with Maria, the Maria Callas snapshot-biopic starring Angelina Jolie.

Pablo Larraín directed the screenplay penned by Steven Knight. For Larraín and Knight, the Netflix movie reteams them after 2021’s Lady Di biopic Spencer, which earned Kristen Stewart a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Larraín’s 2016 movie Jackie, about Jackie Kennedy, also earned its star, Natalie Portman, an Oscar nom. Jolie, already an Oscar winner, here plays the famed opera star as she retreats to Paris after a glamorous and tumultuous life in the public eye.

The pic reimagines the American-Greek soprano in her final days as the diva reckons with her identity and life. In real life, Callas died of a heart attack at her Paris home in 1977 at age 53. RELATED: ‘Maria’ Venice Film Festival Red Carpet: Angelina Jolie, Pablo Larraín & More For Knight, the Peaky Blinders creator who was nominated for an Original Screenplay Oscar in 2004 for Dirty Pretty Things, he had the opportunity to build the Maria screenplay around Jolie, who had became attached to the project during the writing process (“Angelina was always the first choice for the role, indeed the only choice,” he says).