Kevin Spacey will not be Frank Sinatra. The American actor should have played “The Voice” in a biopic, but the crooner’s daughter, Tina, vetoed it and derailed the project. The film should have been directed by Paul Schrader, screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull”, and whose new film, “Oh, Canada”, is in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
The filmmaker is one of the few to have defended the actor since he was the target of numerous accusations of sexual assault and blacklisted in Hollywood. Paul Schrader told the Daily Mail that Kevin Spacey was so touched by her support that he sent her a thank you email twice.
But that was without Tina Sinatra. The singer’s daughter, who owns the rights to her father’s songs, refused to give them up for the film. “We had a great script and we were ready to get started, but Tina wasn’t enthusiastic,” Paul Schrader told the British daily. We couldn’t get his permission for the music, and it’s impossible to do it without it.”
According to the “Daily Mail”, the feature film was to chronicle the end of Sinatra’s career, a time when the singer attempted several comebacks to the forefront while he battled health problems and was entangled in several controversies. “Tina is very protective of her father’s image and this portrait was not at all flattering. I think Kevin would have been good. He was great as Bobby Darin (note: 1950s crooner he played in the film “Beyond The Sea”, in 2017),” adds the director.
Kevin Spacey is a big fan of jazz. He has already gone on stage and covered Sinatra songs in bars in Baltimore (east coast of the United States), recalls the media. But since 2017 and the first accusations of sexual violence against him, he has no longer worked in Hollywood. So far, he has been cleared in the various lawsuits brought against him by several men.
On May 16, 2024, he gave an interview to American television in which he confided that he had learned from his mistakes. “I’m trying to show that I listened. I have learned. I received the message, he told American journalist Chris Cuomo. I truly feel that whatever mistakes I have made in my life, I have paid the price for them.” And to clarify: “I just want to go back to work.”
