Romping Regency love triangle as Hayley Atwell joins the people's Duchess Keira Knightley and Hayley Atwell will soon be sharing a Regency bed with Ralph Fiennes.
Keira and Ralph will portray 18th-century power couple the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire in The Duchess, which starts filming later in the autumn. Hayley will play the Duchess's closest friend Bess, Lady Elizabeth Foster, who later became even closer to the powerful Duke.
According to historian Amanda Foreman, whose bestselling book Georgiana, Duchess Of Devonshire, is the main source material for director Saul Dibbs's film, Bess and the Devonshires lived in a menage a trois for 25 years.
At one point, both women were with child by the Duke - and both produced daughters.
Georgiana was a popular figure and there are those who now perceive her as the 'people's Duchess', a sort of Princess Diana of her day. So you won't be surprised to learn that she was, in fact, Diana's greatgreat-great-great aunt.
Director Dibbs and producer Gaby Tana have also signed up Dominic Cooper to play one of Georgiana's lovers, and on Wednesday night some of the actors gathered at the Wolseley restaurant opposite the Ritz Hotel in London for a bonding session.
Fiennes will play the Duke in between shooting Stephen Daldry's latest picture The Reader, with Nicole Kidman.
Hayley has just completed playing Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited and will go to the Venice Film Festival next week for the launch of Woody Allen's film Cassandra's Dream.
Keira will also be in Venice, where Joe Wright's movie Atonement — the best film of the year so far - opens the festival.
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