Keira Knightley looks set to play the wife of Dylan Thomas in a movie of bizarre but true events where the Thomas home was fired upon by a machine gun and threats were made to throw a grenade through the front window. The screenplay for the movie The Best Time Of Our Lives is written by Knightley's Mum, Sharman Macdonald, a fine Scottish lass.

The Daily Mail newspaper carries the story:

The Oscar-nominated actress has insisted that space be cleared in her hectic schedule so she can star in a movie based on a screenplay written by her mother, award-winning playwright Sharman Macdonald...

...The picture is based on a terrifying incident in 1945 involving Dylan Thomas, his wife Caitlin and another couple - Vera Phillips, a friend of the poet's from his Swansea school days, and her husband William Killick.

After a clash at a pub in New Quay, Killick - using a machine gun - fired at the Thomas home and threatened to hurl a grenade through a window.

The screenplay covers the events leading up to the incident. It certainly sounds an interesting and quite unusual tale, real life does make for the most unusual stories they say. It'll be somewhat of a departure from the more Hollywood roles that we've seen her in of late, and it marks a run of smaller more character related films that she seems to be working on at the moment. This certainly seems like a good career move both publicly and development wise, especially after the Hollywood exposure of Pirates, Jacket, Prejudice and Domino.