The hot, remarkably active young Scottish actor, Ewan McGregor (above), made a flying visit to Cannes to promote his latest movie, Nora, which starts shooting in Dublin tomorrow. He plays James Joyce with Susan Lynch as the film's title character, Nora Barnacle, and the movie is a long-in-gestation project from Pat Murphy, the director of Maeve and Anne Devlin.
Joyce and Barnacle had "an incredible relationship," McGregor said in Cannes, "a deep love for each other. They fought like a couple of bastards, and they loved like a couple of bastards. You might look at the script and think, `This is all just misery'. It's not. It's actually about them really being in love with each other. She stood by him all the way - and, when he died, she'd never read Ulysses, which he wrote when he fell in love with her."
McGregor takes a dual role on Nora, as one of the companies producing it is Natural Nylon, the partnership he formed two years ago with fellow actors Jude Law, Sadie Frost and Jon Pertwee.