Andrea Riseborough To Reign as ‘The Queen of Fashion’ in New Biopic

Andrea Riseborough will personify a British couture iconoclast as The Queen of Fashion. Riseborough will play Isabella Blow in a new biopic that will also star Emilia Clarke and Hayley Atwell. Deadline reports that the film will be shopped at this month’s Cannes Film Festival.

The film, which will be written and directed by Alex Marx in his feature debut, will star Riseborough as Blow, a British fashion editor who discovered a number of up-and-coming fashion talents, including hat designer Philip Treacy, model Sophie Dahl, and superstar fashion designer Alexander McQueen. She was famous for her own eccentric fashion style, particularly her fondness for enormous, unusual hats. Later in life, she struggled with bpolar disorder and ovarian cancer, dying at age 48 in 2007. The film will star Clarke as fashion designer and socialite Daphne Guinness, Atwell as British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, Fionn O’Shea (Normal People) as Treacy, and Richard E. Grant (Loki) as Blow’s father, Evelyn Delves Broughton. Marx has been developing the project for eight years.

Who is Andrea Riseborough?

British actor Riseborough made her film debut alongside Peter O’Toole in a small role in the 2007 film Venus. The chameleonic actor has appeared in a wide variety of roles across a plethora of genres, including the horror films Mandy and Possessor, the Tom Cruise sci-fi actioner Oblivion, the black comedy The Death of Stalin, and the Best Picture winner Birdman. She garnered attention when she was Oscar-nominated in 2023 for her performance in the little-seen To Leslie, which was somewhat controversial, although she ultimately lost to Michelle Yeoh. She can currently be seen on the PBS Masterpiece miniseries Alice & Jack, and in the Max satirical miniseries The Regime. This fall, she will appear with The Regime co-star Kate Winslet in the Lee Miller biopic Lee.

The Queen of Fashion will be produced by Matthew Rhodes for The Hideaway Entertainment, Elise Freeman for Mystic Dawn Media star Riseborough for Mother Sucker, Robert Ogden Barnum, and Catrin Lewis Defis. Executive producers include Alison Owen, Jonathan Gray and Ryan Cassells for The Hideaway Entertainment, Thorsten Schumacher and Claire Taylor for Rocket Science, and Jason Tan. It will be lensed by cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt (The Hunger) with a score by British musician Laura Mvula.

The Queen of Fashion will be shopped at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival; no release date has yet been set. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.