Carey Mulligan will get two chances to walk the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, it was announced today.
The Oscar-nominated British star was already scheduled to glitter on the Croisette when Baz Luhrmann’s hotly anticipated version of F Scott Fitzgerald classic The Great Gatsby opens the event on May 15.
But another of her new releases has also been chosen to compete for the prestigious Palme d’Or. Inside Llewyn Davis, from the Coen brothers, is a story set in the Sixties New York folk scene. Mulligan, 27, star of An Education, will join a cast featuring Justin Timberlake. Her new film will face stiff competition from work by directors with strong Cannes form, such as Only God Forgives, a gangster film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and starring Ryan Gosling. The pair’s LA thriller Drive was a hit at the festival two years ago.
Other entries include Behind The Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s biopic of Liberace, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon; Nebraska, the latest from Sideways director Alexander Payne; and Venus In Fur, an adaptation of a Broadway play from Roman Polanski. Steven Spielberg heads the Cannes jury.
Festival director Thierry Frémaux announced the line-up in Paris today, having tweeted earlier: “As is tradition, we have a mix of auteurs, new discoveries, surprises and stars.”
Other films being screened in Cannes — although not in competition — include a drama by London-based director Stephen Frears, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight. It tells the story of the boxer’s battle with the US authorities over refusing to enrol for the Vietnam War. Ali appears in archive footage.
The festival ends on May 26 with Zulu, by Jerômé Salle, starring Forest Whitaker and Orlando Bloom as police officers in post-apartheid Cape Town.
