Amy Schumer eyeing Christy Martin boxing biopic
WORLD champion boxer Christy Martin helped put women’s boxing on the map, and Amy Schumer is in line to play her in an upcoming movie based on her life and career.
Martin also helped put her exhusband away for a 25-year jail term.
Winning the Junior Welterweight world championship at the age of 25, Martin showed her mettle in a 1996 title defence broadcast on US TV.
She signed with flamboyant promoter Don King in 1993 and by the end of her career had accumulated an 83 per cent win ratio, having administered eight knockouts and 23 TKOs.
And in 2010, some 21 years after her first professional fight, she survived being stabbed and then shot by her husband and trainer, Jim, who had learned she was leaving him for a woman, current partner and old high school friend Sherry Lusk; Jim, 68, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to a 25-year prison term.
With her self-confidence comedy “I Feel Pretty” releasing April 20 in US theatres, Schumer appears ready to take on the Martin life story, having been approached for the biopic’s lead role.
The film has been written by Katherine Fugate, who will make her directorial debut through the project, having been the writer of TV crime thriller “A Killer Among Us” and romcoms “Valentine’s Day” and “New Year’s Eve,” and the creator of wartime romantic drama series “Army Wives.”