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The mama-to-be will develop and star in a big-screen adaptation of Sindiwe Magona's 2000 novel 'Mother to Mother 'through Witherspoon's Type A Films shingle, Universal Studios has confirmed.
Even though 'Mother to Mother is fiction', the book is based on the true story of Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old Stanford student and Fulbright scholar who was killed in 1993 by demonstrators in South Africa.
Biehl had traveled to Cape Town to help South Africans prepare for the country's first-ever democratic elections; she died just days before her scheduled return to the United States.
Magona tells the story through the eyes of the mother of one of Amy's killers, who reaches out to Biehl's grief-stricken mother to find a common bond and explain the circumstances that led to her son's actions.
Call it a case of life imitating art or vice versa, but People magazine recently reported that Amy's mother, Linda Biehl, currently works to improve the lives of South Africa's poor, sick and imprisoned. The Californian oversees the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust dedicated to improving the lives of the people of South Africa, where Amy was murdered, and spends half of each year there.
She has even hired two of her daughter's killers, Easy Nofemela, now 31, and Ntobeko Peni, 28, to help. The men both served four years of 18-year prison sentences before winning release in 1998 on the recommendation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
No word if Linda Biehl's current efforts will be included in the film, which is being produced in collaboration with Anant Singh's Distant Horizon. The producer's credits include 'Cry, the Beloved Country', the current release 'I Capture the Castle' and the upcoming Nelson Mandela biopic, 'Long Walk to Freedom', starring Morgan Freeman.
Witherspoon's currently wrapping filming on another literary adaptation, William Makepeace Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair', as a lower-class girl who uses her feminine wiles to climb London's social ladder in the 1820s. The movie hits theaters next year.
The Southern belle will then move on to her next production, delivering her second child with hubby Ryan Phillippe. The actress is six months pregnant and reportedly had to make use of strategically-placed furniture and flowing dresses to disguise her condition on the set of 'Vanity Fair'.
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