Ronald Harwood adapts play for screen

Headline, BBC get 'Quartet' comedy

By ADAM DAWTREY

LONDON -- Ronald Harwood is adapting his play "Quartet" into a feature film for Headline Pictures and BBC Films.

A comedy set in a retirement home for musicians, four opera singers are invited to relive their greatest moment by performing the famous quartet from "Rigoletto" at a birthday celebration for composer Giuseppi Verdi.

The situation is complicated by the fact that two of them used to be married to each other, and one of them refuses to sing. "This is a story about life-long friendships and rivalries between four wilful but gifted people who finally join together and surprise themselves by creating something very special," said producer Stewart Mackinnon.

The play was first performed in 1999 and was nominated for an Olivier award for new comedy. The four leading parts were played by Stephanie Cole, Alec McCowan, Donald Sinden and Angela Thorne.

Since then, it has been staged all around the world; a production is running in Finland.

This will be the third time Harwood has adapted one of his own plays for the big screen, following "The Dresser" in 1983 (for which he received his first Oscar nomination) and "Taking Sides" in 2001.

"I'm very good at abandoning the play and trying to realize it as a film," Harwood told Variety.

"Quartet" was inspired by a docu Harwood saw about the Casa Verdi in Milan, a house the composer bequeathed to become an old musicians' home.

Harwood won an Oscar for "The Pianist" and was nominated last year for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

Headline Pictures is a film and TV production company run by Mackinnon, Mark Shivas and Kevin Hood. Its other movie projects include "Alec and May," a romance about inventor Alexander Graham Bell, which is in development at the Weinstein Co., with Patricia Riggen ("La misma luna") attached to direct; and "Peter Pan in Scarlet" with BBC Films.