New 'Great Expectations' part of Dickens 200th anniversary celebrations

(AFP PHOTO)

Director Mike Newell will follow up last year's action-adventure Prince of Persia with a new film adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.

Plans to release the film in 2012 are part of a year-long celebration of the 200th anniversary of the novelist's birth, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

On February 7, the British Film Institute announced "the largest-ever retrospective of film and television adaptations of Dickens's work," set to tour the globe in 2012, including visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Cinémathèque grançaise in Paris.

The bicentenary, called "Dickens 2012," will be coordinated by the Charles Dickens Museum, Film London and an international group of institutions to deliver a program of events on February 7, 2012.

Of the various films based on the tale, one of the truest versions of Great Expectations is David Lean's 1946 version starring Jean Simmons and Alec Guinness. Also, Anthony Hopkins starred in a 1989 rendition in which Jean Simmons appeared, and a 1974 version featured Michael York and Sarah Miles.

Alfonso Cuarón ( Y Tu Mamá También, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) did a modernized telling of the tale starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert DeNiro in 1998.

Great Expectations tells the tale of Pip, an orphan in 1800s England who attains wealth through the gift of an unknown benefactor.

Dickens 2012 Bicentenary on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=16995190284
The bicentennial site (still under construction): http://www.dickens2012.org/

RC