Two-time Academy Award winner Sally Field will star as Mary Todd Lincoln, wife to the 16th President of the United States, in DreamWorks Studios’ Lincoln to be directed by Steven Spielberg. The announcement was made today by Spielberg and Stacey Snider, Co-Chairman and CEO of DreamWorks Studios.
Sally Field joins Daniel Day-Lewis, who has been cast to play Abraham Lincoln in the Spielberg film.
“I’m excited to be working with Sally for the first time,” said Steven Spielberg. “I’ve admired her films and she has always been my first choice to portray all the fragility and complexity that was Mary Todd Lincoln.”
“To have the opportunity to work with Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis and to play one of the most complicated and colorful women in American history is simply as good as it gets,” said Sally Field.
Based on the best-selling book, “Team of Rivals,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, the screenplay has been written by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Tony Award winner, and Academy Award nominated writer Tony Kushner. It will be produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg.
It is anticipated that the film will focus on the political collision of Lincoln and the powerful men of his cabinet on the road to abolition and the end of the Civil War.
Filming is expected to begin in the fall of 2011 for release in the fourth quarter of 2012 through Disney’s Touchstone distribution label.
Field currently stars in the ABC series “Brothers & Sisters” and is also filming Sony Pictures’ The Amazing Spider-Man.
