Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: HBO Films has set up the Marisa Acocella Marchetto memoir Cancer Vixen: A True Story as a star vehicle for Cate Blanchett. The actress will be an executive producer on the project alongside Maven Pictures partners Trudie Styler and Celine Rattray. They are meeting with writers but the prospect of having the Oscar-winning actress in the lead role makes this a priority project. Blanchett has been sweet on the book for some time.

The protagonist is a cartoonist for magazines like The New Yorker and Glamour with a supercharged Manhattan lifestyle who is about to get married but must re-examine her life through wit and her animation when she is diagnosed with breast cancer.

Blanchett is shooting the George Clooney-directed The Monuments Men and is attached to Disney’s Cinderella, which Kenneth Branagh will direct. She’s repped by CAA.