Reese Witherspoon is Peggy Lee

By Sarah Sluis

Maybe Reese Witherspoon has the Oscar itch again? In 2006, she won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the singer and performer June Carter in the musical biopic Walk the Line. Now she's going back to the music and will star in a biopic of Peggy Lee. What's more, Nora Ephron will write and direct the movie.

Side by side, Lee and Witherspoon have a believable resemblance to each other, especially when they're matched for age. Perhaps that's why Witherspoon herself secured the rights to Lee's life from the family's estate after being approached by Lee's granddaughter.

Until recently, Ephron has never tackled the famous person genre, but the success of her adaptation of Julie & Julia last summer may have inspired her to take on this project. Ephron herself usually writes light romance and comedy, which makes me wonder if maybe this biopic will have a lighter take on Lee's life. Generally, musical biographies are filled with some pretty low lows. Lee's Wikipedia page mentions her four marriages, and some biographies mention that she drank heavily but may or may not have crossed the line of being an alcoholic. That's certainly enough to fill the dark chapter of most movies, but not so much that these need to be the defining lows of Lee's life. When Ephron wrote about Julia Child, what came across most was her ebullience and her zest for life. Yes, Ephron's film included some scenes of her difficulty putting together her cookbook, and her sadness at not having children like her sister, but the overall portrait was upbeat. Maybe that's what people need. I don't know if I want to see another dark movie about drug-abusing, alcoholic singers. I'd rather have one about a fun singer who maybe drinks a little too much and gets married a few too many times. Let's see what Ephron comes up with.

With Ephron and Witherspoon banded together, this project could get moving quickly. Witherspoon attaches herself to projects that don't always get off the ground (right away), but once Ephron announces a project, it seems to get made--she currently has zero projects in development on her IMDB page, while Witherspoon has fourteen projects. In the meantime, while Ephron writes the script, audiences can catch Witherspoon this December in the James L. Brooks comedy How Do You Know, and next April in the literary adaptation Water for Elephants--she's quite the busy actress.