Is Passing the new Loving for Oscar nominee Ruth?

AFTER landing an Oscar nomination in 2016 for Loving, Ruth Negga is to star in another Hollywood race drama.

The 36-year-old Irish-Ethiopian star, pictured, has been signed up for the film Passing based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen.

It tells the story of two childhood friends in Harlem, played by Ruth and Tessa Thompson, and deals with ‘racial passing’ where a member of one racial group passes herself off as a member of another and is accepted.

Love/Hate star Ruth and Tessa play two mixed-race AfricanAmerican women who took different paths of racial identification. One identified as black and married a black doctor, while the other passed herself off as white and wed a white man.

The film, directed by actress Rebecca Hall in her debut feature, explores their experiences when they come together as adults.

Ruth, who was raised in Limerick by an Irish mother after her Ethiopian father was killed in a car crash when she was seven, won rave reviews for her portrayal of Mildred Loving, a black woman who was arrested for marrying a white man in 1950s Virginia, in the acclaimed film Loving.

The true story told how the couple were ordered to leave the state for good or be jailed because mixed-race marriages were illegal at the time.

As well as being nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, Ruth also became the darling of the fashion world with her distinctive style, appearing on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter and being hailed as one of the world’s best-dressed women by American Vogue.