Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson is to portray the Queen in a TV drama based on Michael Fagan’s Buckingham Palace intrusion 30 years ago.

Entitled Walking The Dogs, the film will tell the tale of how Fagan gained entry to the palace and entered the Queen’s bedroom in 1982.

Eddie Marsan and Russell Tovey will also star in the dramatisation.

The film, to be screened later this year, is part of a new drama series for Sky Arts called Playhouse Presents.

Brenda Blethyn, Stephen Fry, Richard E Grant and Sheila Hancock have also been lined up to star in new dramas that have been commissioned for the channel.

It has also been announced that veteran chat show host Sir Michael Parkinson is to return to TV, four years after he retired.

The star, who bowed out from his ITV series in 2007, is to front a six-part series called Masterclass with Michael Parkinson.

The show will focus on a different star each week and Sir Michael will uncover how they perfected their art.

The 76-year-old said he was “delighted” to have landed the new role.

The series will be filmed in front of a studio audience, who will also be able to ask questions.

Channel director James Hunt described Sir Michael as “one of our country’s finest broadcasters”.

He added: “This new interview series will allow Sir Michael to get closer than ever before to his subject, extracting the essence of their character in a way that only he can.”

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Two time Oscar nominee Emma Thompson is in final negotiations to star in supernatural love story Beautiful Creatures. Directed by Richard LaGravenese (P.S. I Love You) from his own adaptation of the New York Times best selling novel of the same name, Thompson will join current Oscar nominee Viola Davis as well as newcomers Jack O’Connell and Alice Englert.Thompson will play the dual role of Mrs. Lincoln, a small town religious zealot, and Sarafine, who is the dark witch who possesses her. Erwin Stoff (I Am Legend) will produce along with Kosove and Johnson (The Book of Eli) and Molly Smith (P.S. I Love You). Thompson will next be seen in Sony’s MIB3, the third installment in the Men in Black franchise due out in May. Alcon, which has film rights to all three books in the series published by Little Brown Books is looking at Creatures to launch a possible franchise at Warner Bros. Filming will begin in April in and around New Orleans. Alcon recently produced Dolphin Tale, a 3-D family film starring Morgan Freeman, Harry Connick Jr., Ashley Judd and Kris Kristofferson. Thompson is repped by WME.

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“Effie,” which features 17-year-old Dakota Fanning in one of her first adult roles, tells the story of the disastrous marriage between 19th-century art critic John Ruskin and his young bride Effie Gray. It was a train wreck of a union, a collision of opposites that ended after Effie fell truly, madly, scandalously in love with wild-eyed young artist John Everett Millais.

“It’s the ultimate bad marriage,” said Emma Thompson, the Academy Award winning actress and writer behind “Effie”`s screenplay.

She said she was drawn to the story by its “archetypal quality.”

“It happens to be a costume drama, but you could be doing a story with this kind of complexity and oddness in any period,” Thompson said on the set of “Effie” at West Wycombe House, an exuberantly ornate 18th-century mansion in the Chiltern Hills northwest of London.

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Another update to the Everything Emma Thompson gallery with screencaps, stills and posters from “Howard’s End.”

One of the first of a couple of updates today, I’ve added the Henry V caps and photos to the Everything Emma Thompson Gallery.

New event photos up in the Everything Emma Thompson Gallery!

Three Hollywood actresses have stated they are not down with plastic surgery – Kate Winslet, Rachel Weisz and Emma Thompson. Good for them, we say!

Kate, a six-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner, tells U.K. newspaper The Guardian, “It goes against my morals, the way that my parents brought me up and what I consider to be natural beauty. I will never give in. I am an actress, I don’t want to freeze the expression of my face.” Winslet is a

Winslet’s “Sense and Sensibility” co-star and Oscar winner Emma Thompson echoes her sentiments. “We’re in this awful youth-driven thing now where everybody needs to look 30 at 60.”

“People who look too perfect don’t look sexy or particularly beautiful,” says Rachel Weisz, an Oscar winner for the 2005 film “The Constant Gardener.”

We strongly support you, ladies! You are so beautiful just as you are
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EXCLUSIVE: Dakota Fanning will star in the title role of Effie, the Emma Thompson-scripted period biopic about the unfortunate marriage between Euphemia Gray and the famed critic John Ruskin in 1850s London. Richard Laxton (An Englishman in New York) is directing. Though the teenager was gorgeous, Effie’s husband never consummated the marriage over five years because Ruskin was for some reason disgusted by her body. After suffering through a loveless marriage and browbeating by her in-laws, Effie fell in love with Ruskin’s protégé, painter John Everett Millais.

Greg Wise will play Ruskin, and Tom Sturridge will play Millais. Thompson plays Lady Eastlake, who takes Effie under her wing when it was clear the union was destroying the young woman. Julie Walters and Derek Jacobi play Ruskin’s parents, and Edward Fox is in talks to play Lady Eastlake’s husband, Sir Charles Eastlake. He was the main patron of the Royal Academy, which held sway over what constituted fine art. He was already fed up with Ruskin and his radical ideas before that love triangle rocked the art community. Production will begin Oct. 17 in Scotland, London and Venice. The film’s being produced by Don Rosenfeld with Andreas Roald. They raised the $10 million budget through private equity.

The foreplay on this movie lasted as long the marriage between Effie and Ruskin, but at least here, Effie has the satisfaction of a start date. Along the way, Carey Mulligan and Saoirse Ronan had previously been reported as circling the Effie role, but the movie’s momentum was interrupted when Gregory Murphy took the producers to court claiming copyright infringement regarding his play The Countess, which also probed the Ruskin marriage. All this works out well for Fanning, who is now 17.

“It’s Emma Thompson’s first original script after doing several fine adaptations, and it gets to the heart of Victorian England,” said Rosenfeld, the former head of Merchant Ivory Productions. Rosenfeld and Roald are also producers of the Terrence Malick-directed The Voyage of Time, for which Thompson has signed on to be one of the narrators. “The script for Effie was always brilliant, but sometimes these things take time.” Rosenfeld said. The timing allowed them to raise the funding without having to pre-sell foreign or domestic territories. That won’t come until the film’s premiere, which the filmmakers hope will come at the 2012 Venice Film Festival.

Fanning, who just wrapped the final two installments of Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, is repped by One Talent Management and The Osbrink Agency.

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