Lady Gaga and Adam Driver in House of Gucci. Picture: Instagram.
After her Oscar-nominated performance in Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born, singer and actress Lady Gaga is returning to the big screen alongside an A-list cast on the novel based film, The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed by Sara Gay Forden.
Directed by Ridley Scott, the movie features some big-name stars including Star Wars‘ Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jared Leto, and Jeremy Irons. Jack Huston, Reeve Carney, Camille Cottin, Eva Moore, Youssef Kerkour, and Florence Andrews.
Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani – Maurizio’s ex-wife who was tried and convicted of plotting his assassination in 1995 and was behind bars for 18 years before being released in 2016.
The movie is centred around the real-life story of Patrizia Reggiani (Gaga), an Italian socialite who married Maurizio Gucci(Driver) – the 20-something grandson of Gucci founder Guccio Gucci, in 1972.
Maurizio plays the heir to the Gucci Empire. Set in the 1970s, the movie seems to go into the details of the couple’s marriage.
This includes their divorce in 1985, which was only settled in 1991, partly because Gucci walked out on his wife for another woman, Paola Franchi, after saying he was going on a business trip and just never bothered to return.
He was shot and murdered by a hired hitman outside his office in March 1995. Reggiani was arrested in 1997 for the murder and given the name ‘The Black Widow’ by the press in Italy.
It was later found that she paid $365 000 for the hit and was handed a 26-year prison sentence. Upon her release, she made extremely flippant remarks about his killing when asked why she didn’t shoot him herself by the press. She casually remarked: “My eyesight is not so good. I didn’t want to miss.”
Meanwhile, one of Maurizio’s second cousins, Patrizia Gucci told the Associated Press the family was worried that the film goes beyond the headline-grabbing true-crime story and pries into the private lives of the Guccio Gucci heirs.
“We are truly disappointed. I speak on behalf of the family,” she said.
“They are stealing the identity of a family to make a profit, to increase the income of the Hollywood system. Our family has an identity and privacy. We can talk about everything, but there is a borderline that cannot be crossed.”
Gucci said she reached out to Ridley Scott’s wife, Giannina Facio, for clarification on the scope of the film, but has not received any reply.
She also said the Gucci family will decide what further action they might take after seeing the film and that their concerns stemmed from the casting of top actors to play family members whose stories intersect little with Maurizio Gucci’s murder.
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