Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Al Pacino's got another Shakespearean adaptation lined up, following **The Merchant of Venice **and quasi-adaptation Looking for Richard, and now it's the turn of King Lear, one of the late, serious ones.
Pacino has been offered the chance to play Lear before, but hasn't felt ready (read: old enough) until now. The story, for those of you who slept through fifth year English, follows the titular King as he resolves to split his domains between his three daughters, determining the split according to how much they love him. But when the two elder flatter him outrageously and the youngest (his favourite) refuses to play the game, he disinherits her and ends up miserable himself. As Shakespeare himself would say, like, bummer.
Michael Radford, of Il Postino and The Merchant of Venice (with Pacino) is set to direct, with shooting due to start later this year in the wonderfully non-specific "Europe". We're told that the picture will be true "to its period, very similar to the classic look of Merchant of Venice", and we're guessing that means the period it was written, rather than the period when Lear actually lived (pre-Roman Britain).