Ballerina Frankie is the cat that got the cream in first major film role
RoyaL Ballet star Francesca Hayward is lapping up a major role in the movie version of Cats. The 26- year- old principal dancer has joined director Tom Hooper’s all-star cast.
She will play a white kitten called Victoria, a pivotal role in the film, which has been rehearsing at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire.
one executive on the film, backed by the Working Title production company, said that securing Hayward, known as Frankie, was a ‘major piece of casting. She’s purrfect’.
Victoria’s character will act as a liaison to the different breeds of cat who gather in a junkyard ruled over by old Deuteronomy, to be played by Judi Dench in a gender-change from the original stage musical, which opened in London in 1981.
andrew Lloyd Webber, who wrote the score for Cats, has written a new song for the film which, I understand, will be sung by the kitten Victoria.
Director Hooper, who made the screen version of Les Miserables and won an oscar for The King’s Speech, scoured the dance world with casting director Lucy Bevan and auditioned hundreds of dancers for the movie.
Scores of dancers have been rehearsing the choreography at Leavesden, and this week they were joined by James Corden and Jennifer Hudson, who plays glamour-puss Grizabella.
others due to slink onto the set in readiness for the official start of filming from mid December include Idris Elba, Taylor Swift and Ian McKellen. as big as those names are, it was a coup to get Hayward.
She did her first dance moves at three years of age at a ballet class held in a room behind a carpet shop in Worthing, West Sussex. She was accepted into the Royal Ballet School when she was 11.
at 18, she graduated into the Royal Ballet Company and quickly made her mark, winning a series of important roles and rapid promotion in the company from First artist to Soloist, then First Soloist to Principal two years ago.
Her principal roles have been in Mayerling, Manon, alice In Wonderland and Giselle.
and now she’s becoming a film star in 2018, though the completed film won’t be released until late next year.
Hayward was born in Nairobi in 1992 to a Kenyan mother and an English father, but at the age of two she moved to Sussex to live with her grandparents, who gave her a video of The Nutcracker to watch, sparking her love of ballet.
Working Title’s Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan and their fellow Les Mis producer Debra Hayward set director Hooper up with design wizards two years ago to develop a way of combining humans and computer-generated imagery for the film.