Eagle Eye Drama to Adapt Barbara Cartland Biography — SkimNews
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- Eagle Eye Drama acquired the rights to The Great Dictator, Matthew Sweet's biography of Dame Barbara Cartland, published this month by Hodder & Stoughton.
- Dame Barbara Cartland (born 1901), known for her pink chiffon wardrobe and Pekinese dogs, was the third-best-selling author of all time behind Shakespeare and Agatha Christie, with her romance novels selling close to a billion copies in 38 languages.
- Cartland was step-grandmother to Princess Diana, dined with Margaret Thatcher — to whom she prescribed alternative remedies and oxygen supplements — and was a friend of Winston Churchill, according to Eagle Eye CCO Jo McGrath.
- Sweet's biography received positive reviews from The Guardian, The Times, and documentarian Louis Theroux, and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, per Hodder & Stoughton's Tom Perrin.
- Eagle Eye Drama CEO Walter Iuzzolino said Sweet gained 'unparalleled access to the Cartland family archives,' describing the resulting story as 'more compelling and unbelievable than her most outlandish plots' and ideal material for an 'unmissable scripted series.'
- Eagle Eye is the production house behind ITV's Bookish (starring Mark Gatiss), Patience and Professor T, Channel 4's The Couple Next Door, and is currently adapting the Richard Armitage crime series Winter.
- Anne Reid previously portrayed Cartland in the BBC's 2008 telemovie In Love with Barbara, one of several documentaries that have examined the author's life.
Why it matters: The acquisition gives Eagle Eye a prestige literary property — backed by Baillie Gifford Prize longlisting and reviews in The Guardian and The Times — and a ready-made starring vehicle, since McGrath explicitly called Cartland 'a gift of a role for a great actress.' Cartland's billion-copy sales record across 38 languages also gives the project obvious international distribution upside for ITV Studios' global sales arm.
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