Pair in talks to topline yacht racing drama…
According to Baz Bamigboye over at The Daily Mail, Oscar-winners Colin Firth (‘The Railway Man’) and Kate Winslet (‘Labor Day) have entered into talks to co-star in a drama about 1960s yacht-racing cheat Donald Crowhurst.
Scripted by Scott Burns (‘Side Effects,’ ‘Contagion’), the film details how the British businessman and amateur sailor (Firth) duped his family, race organisers and the public into believing that he had spent 240 days circumnavigating the globe in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a prestigious single-handed, round-the-world yacht race.
Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from The Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Under-equipped and ill-prepared, the amateur sailor encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. It is believed that Crowhurst’s deceptions about his whereabouts ended in insanity and suicide.
Winslet would be portraying Crowhurst’s wife, Clare, who was known as the ‘sea widow’ when it all happened.