EXCLUSIVE: Renate Reinsve looks set to star in Mia Hansen-Løve’s eagerly awaited Mary Wollstonecraft biopic If Love Should Die, exploring the life of the 18th century English writer, philosopher and women’s rights advocate.
First announced in 2024, the feature will follow the last 12 years in the life of Wollstonecraft, who is also famed for being the mother of Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley.
Opening on the eve of the French Revolution, the film will follow Wollstonecraft, then an impoverished young Englishwoman, as makes the bold decision to lead her life according to the ideals of the enlightenment.
Reinsve’s involvement in the production, which is due to shoot this summer, comes as the Sentimental Value actress is in Cannes as the co-star of Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or contender Fjord opposite Sebastian Stan.
Producer partners on the film include Mubi, the UK’s Caspian Films and Paris-based Les Films Pelléas, which produced Hansen-Løve’s previous five films including One Fine Morning with Léa Seydoux, and Bergman Island, starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth and Mia Wasikowska.
Reinsve’s involvement in the film came to light during an interview at the Deadline Studio for the Cannes Critics’ Week closing film Adieu Monde Cruel.
The film’s young co-star Jane Beever revealed, with the permission of Hansen-Løve, that she had been cast in the film opposite Reinsve.
Deadline has contacted Hansen-Løve’s long-time producers at Les Films Pelléas for confirmation of Reinsve’s casting in the lead role.
Wollstonecraft is best known for her work ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, published in 1792, where she argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, even if they appeared so in her time because they lacked equal access to education.
Wollstonecraft believed that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagined a social order founded on reason. Her ideas and writings laid the groundwork for the feminist movement, making her a pioneering figure in the fight for gender equality.