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A Special Relationship focuses on Taylor's friendship with her gay assistant Roger Wall and on being a pioneering ally for people with HIV and AIDS.
Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz is going from playing queer in back-to-back films last year (Disobedience, The Favourite) to portraying Elizabeth Taylor in a biopic that will spotlight the gay icon's AIDS activism, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Battle of the Sexes and Slumdog Millionaire scribe Simon Beaufoy wrote the screenplay based on interviews and conversations with people who knew Taylor. The female directing duo of Bert and Bertie (this year's Sundance smash Troop Zero) will helm. The team behind The King's Speech is producing.
The film, titled A Special Relationship, focuses on the abiding friendship between Hollywood icon Taylor and her personal assistant Roger Wall (a gay man who grew up in poverty in the Deep South) and how the AIDS epidemic shaped their lives.
"Audiences are clearly fascinated by the private lives of iconic Hollywood stars," producers Iain Canning and Emile Sherman said, according to THR.
"There is no one more iconic than Elizabeth Taylor, and Simon Beaufoy has written a role that shines a light on Elizabeth's humor and humanity, which will be beautifully brought to life through the extraordinary talents of Rachel Weisz."
An Oscar winner for Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Taylor became an outspoken AIDS activist early in the epidemic and a founding national chairperson of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Wall was HIV-positive and died by suicide in 1991. Taylor called his death "one of the biggest losses of my life" in a 1992 Vanity Fair expose.
Taylor, the first major celebrity to stand up for people with HIV and AIDS in the 80s, is widely considered to be the person who brought the epidemic out of the shadows.
"Elizabeth put a face to AIDS," producer Gary Pudney, who helped Taylor organize her first AIDS event, said in 1992.
