Emma Stone and Alicia Vikander set for rival Agatha Christie biopics

The Danish Girl star Alicia Vikander and The Amazing Spider-Man’s Emma Stone have both been lined up to play a young Agatha Christie in biopics being developed at rival Hollywood studios.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Vikander has been approached by Sony to play the celebrated crime author in her formative years as a “proto-feminist” unhappy with traditional wife-and-mother expectations. Stone, on the other hand, has been pencilled in for Paramount’s take on Christie’s “missing” 11 days in 1926 – a subject already covered in Michael Apted’s 1979 film Agatha, which starred Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman.

The resurgence of interest in Christie follows a flurry of interest from film-makers in getting film versions of the writer’s work off the ground. A forthcoming adaptation of her 1934 yarn Murder on the Orient Express has Kenneth Branagh in the director’s chair and Angelina Jolie in the cast, is due to start shooting this summer and will be released in 2017. A version of the 1939 mystery And Then There Were None was successfully aired on BBC1 at Christmas, and leading British film compnay Working Title are moving ahead with a feature film adaptation to be directed by The Imitation Game’s Morten Tyldum. However, a Julian Fellowes-scripted adaptation of Crooked House appears to have stalled, after an announcement in 2012 that Possession director Neil LaBute was on board.

The current activity around Christie’s work is ascribed to Acorn Media’s purchase of a 64% stake in the Christie estate in 2013 from entertainment company Chorion, who themselves had bought the rights to Christie’s work in 1998. Chorion had overseen the reworking of the Miss Marple stories for TV – a series which began in 2004 – but Acorn, who were the DVD distributors for Marple, are thought to have ambitions in the feature film arena. The last set of major big-screen adaptations arrived in the mid-1970s, with a cameo-studded cast coming together on Murder on the Orient Express in 1974 and Death on the Nile in 1978.

Any film adaptation of the writer’s work will also have to secure the approval of Christie’s descendants, who are thought to hold a 36% stake in the company that holds licensing rights.