Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman will play a Jewish housewife turned investigative reporter from Pikesville in an upcoming limited TV series.
The series, which was greenlighted by Apple TV+, is an adaptation of “Lady in the Lake,” a New York Times best-selling 2019 murder mystery novel penned by acclaimed Baltimore-based author Laura Lippman.
The Jerusalem-born Portman, 39, will portray Maddie Schwartz, a bored Pikesville wife and mother who decides to reinvent herself as an investigative journalist to figure out an unsolved murder. The series is set in mid-1960s Baltimore.
Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o will co-star as Cleo Sherwood, a Black mother juggling multiple jobs while attempting to help advance Baltimore’s civil rights agenda.
The series will be directed by Israeli filmmaker Alma Har’el, and executive produced by Portman, Nyong’o, Lippman, and “Lady in the Lake” adaptation co-creator and co-writer Dre Ryan.
“Lady in the Lake” was inspired by a pair of real-life local murders, including that of Esther Lebowitz, 11, a Bais Yaakov School for Girls fifth grade student who was brutally murdered in Northwest Baltimore in September of 1969. Lebowitz’s murderer, Wayne Stephen Young, died in 2016 while serving a life sentence at Jessup Correctional Institution.
“This was in the newspaper at the time, and it fascinated me because I was only 10,” Lippman, 62, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, told National Public Radio in 2019. “I don’t think I even knew that children could be murder victims before that case.”
The other homicide case on which “Lady in the Lake” is based is the June 1969 murder of Shirley Lee Wigeon Parker, a Black 35-year-old bookkeeper, barmaid and waitress whose body was discovered in the fountain at Druid Hill Park Reservoir. That case remains unsolved.
“When I decided to write a novel set in the ’60s, I very much wanted to look at these two different deaths, and how differently they had been portrayed in media,” Lippman told NPR.
“Lady in the Lake” will be Portman’s first leading role in a television series, as well as the first TV project for Har’el, whose film debut was the well-received 2019 drama “Honey Boy,” starring and written by Shia LaBeouf.
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