Finally, Hollywood is adapting Patricia Highsmith’s pre-Lolita 1952 lesbian road trip novel The Price of Saltinto a film. And the amazing news is that it will star Oscar winner Cate Blanchett as Carol the older, wealthy married woman who falls in love with a young woman who aspires to be a theater set designer but who works in a department store. Mia Wasikowska, star of Albert Nobbs, The Kids are All Right’sandJane Eyre, will play Therese, the younger woman, according to Deadline.
Highsmith, who had relationships with both men and women throughout her life, according to her biography, penned The Price of Salt, originally known as just Carol, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.
Several of Highsmith’s novels have been adapted to film, most famously Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers on a Trainand Anthony Minghella’s imagining of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which starred, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Blanchett.
John Crowley (Intermission andBoy A) is set to direct the film with a screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, who wrote the Annette Bening starrer Mrs. Harris, reports Deadline.
Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt during the heyday of lesbian pulp novels, but her tale, which is often heartbreaking, varied greatly from the bleak outlook of so many pulp novels, offering up a glimmer of hope with its “happy ending,” in which she left it open to the chance that the women could end up staying together.
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