You'd be forgiven for thinking that Kirsten Dunst is still that baby-faced teenage dream in cult movies The Virgin Suicides, Bring It On and Marie Antoinette. But then you remember that
the 34 year old is a Hollywood veteran, a former child star who famously scored a (chaste) kiss from Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire - so a directorial debut is actually due course, really. Kirsten already has dozens of films credits to her name, but she's set to follow the ambitious footsteps of Angelina Jolie and make the switch from actress to director, taking on her first feature length movie. Her first big gig? An adaptation of Sylvia Plath's haunting 1963 novel The Bell Jar. And she's already got Dakota Fanning in line to play the lead.
It's not the first time Dunst has stepped into the director's chair - she's also got a couple of short films under her belt, but this adaptation marks her first feature film. 2016 seems to be the year where Dunst is really stepping things up - she just scored an Emmy nomination for her work in TV series Fargo, which comes off the back of a stint on this year's panel of judges at the esteemed Cannes Film Festival.
The Bell Jar is American poet and author Sylvia Plath's only novel, and it was brought to life on film in 1979. It follows the travels of young graduate Esther Greenwood, who takes on a summer internship at a magazine in New York, but fails to find any satisfaction. The novel marks her slow descent into mental illness and is thought to mirror the mental state of author Sylvia Plath, who suffered from depression and committed suicide by placing her head in an oven at age 30. In a strange coincidence, this is the same deeply depressing way one of the characters died in Sofia Coppola's evocative book-to-film adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, which Dunst starred in. We're betting she picked up some directorial tricks from Coppola during this time - the pair went on work together on Marie Antoinette as well.
