Hiddleston the cowboy crooner . . .

Tom HIDDLESTON has been working on the nasal twang that was the distinctive trademark of country music legend Hank Williams, whom the star will portray in what he called ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’.

I wrote, fleetingly, last week that Hiddleston — famous for playing the scheming and vengeful Loki in three marvel Comic movies as well as his brilliant portrait of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in Josie Rourke’s scorching production at the Donmar — will tackle the part of Williams in a new film.

Yesterday, he spoke exclusively to me about the hillbilly with the ‘crooked smile and a wary eye’ he’ll play in I Saw The Light.

The movie will begin shooting in october in Louisiana, although Hiddleston (pictured as Hank) has already started learning how to sing Williams’s doleful ballads with the help of Country & Western star Rodney Crowell. Tom will have to replicate those bluesy vocals and play the guitar.

Hiddleston told me I Saw The Light will chart the singer’s life from his turbulent first marriage to Audrey mae Sheppard in 1944, through his early radio career to his auspicious debut, in 1949, at the home of country music, the Grand ole opry in Nashville.

There, Williams electrified the audience with his performance of Lovesick Blues, which reigned at No. 1 on the Billboard Country & Western charts for four months that year.

The film will get under the skin of Hank’s relationships with the aforementioned Audrey mae, his mother Lillie, Nashville music executive Fred Rose, his band the Drifting Cowboys and second wife Billie Jean Jones eshliman.

‘It will go all the way to his tragic death in 1953,’ Hiddleston told me. ‘He was only 29. In the intervening period, he wrote some of the greatest songs in the history of American music.’

Numbers such as Hey, Good Lookin’, Jambalaya (on The Bayou), Your Cheatin’ Heart and Take These Chains From my Heart.

‘The film is about the man behind the myth, the power of his music, the sheer voltage of his talent and charisma, and his formidable demons,’ Hiddleston continued.

‘He worked hard, played hard, lived hard — there were women, there was whiskey — but when he sang about being in the doghouse in move It on over, or about his heartbreak in I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, it came from an honest place.’

marc Abraham’s screenplay ‘pulls no punches’, the actor added, and explores Williams’s ‘shattering, self-abusive relationship with alcohol and later prescription drugs’.

The singer, who suffered debilitating back pain from a congenital disorder of the spine, died of a heart attack on New Year’s Day in 1953.

Abraham, who will also direct, saw Hiddleston in Coriolanus and knew he had his man, even though the RADA-trained British thespian may seem an unlikely fit for the farm boy from mount olive, Alabama.

But Abraham said Tom has the rare ability to ‘transform himself’.

Hiddleston adds: ‘Hank’s life has a tragic arc, but in simple truth, he was a genius: a star that burned twice as bright and lived half as long. It’s a huge role for me and a huge responsibility. I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.’