Gwyneth's New Role Stirs Scandal
Fresh from last year's literary romance, Possession, Gwyneth Paltrow is set to play another tortured poetess, Sylvia Plath. The BBC has budgeted $11 million for Ted and Sylvia, which will dramatize the life of Plath, best known for her affecting novel, The Bell Jar. The biopic is expected to cover her famed marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, as well as her 1963 suicide.
The upcoming project has Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, in a rage. Thus, she's penned a protest poem entitled "My Mother," to be published in the March issue of Britain's Tatler magazine. "My buried mother / Is dug up for repeat performances," Hughes vents in her verse. "Now they want to make a film / For anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven."
Hughes goes on to call Paltrow the BBC's "Sylvia Suicide Doll, / Who will walk and talk / And die at will, / And die and die, / And forever be dying."
In an interview she granted TV Guide Online before Hughes issued her poetic rant, Paltrow said Plath's death won't be sensationalized — despite rumors that the writer was driven to suicide by her husband's infidelity. "This isn't like, 'Let's vilify Ted Hughes!'" the actress insisted. "It's a very kind of honest look at these people, and their work and life and love and dynamic. I'm opposed to looking at him like, 'Oh, he's the murderer of Sylvia Plath.' Life is not that black and white."
