Brie Larson to play activist

Academy Award-winning actress Brie Larson will star in a movie about the first woman to run for US president decades before American women even had the right to vote.

Larson, 27, will play the lead in Victoria Woodhull about the 1872 presidential candidate in a film by Amazon Studios, according to online entertainment magazine Deadline.com.

Woodhull was the first woman to seek the US presidency.

Last year, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, was the first woman to win the presidential nomination by a major political party.

A candidate of the Equal Rights Party, Woodhull was an unconventional reformer and champion of female suffrage. She lost to Republican Ulysses S. Grant.

Victoria Woodhull will be co-produced by Larson, who won an Oscar last year for her role as a captive mother in the movie Room. Women in the United States won the right to vote in 1920.