Hugh Bonneville signs up to play author Roald Dahl in new movie

Downton Abbey actor Hugh Bonneville will star in a new biopic about British children’s author Roald Dahl.

The novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter and fighter pilot was born in 1916 in Cardiff, Wales and died in 1990 in Oxford, England.

Roald Dahl is the writer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, The BFG and many more stories.

Bonneville, who starred as the Earl of Grantham in all six seasons of Downton, will play Dahl in the early 1960s as the author struggles to write some of his most famous works.

Set in New York, England and Los Angeles, the movie will focus on Dahl’s marriage to Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal and will track the “personal triumphs and tragedies behind the marriage of two globally known superstars.”

Dahl married the Breakfast At Tiffany actress in 1953, but the couple later divorced in 1983.

Producer Elliot Jenkins commented: “[Dahl] was such a man of wounded parts below his polished veneer of self-confidence.”

The producer added that he couldn’t “imagine anyone better than Hugh Bonneville” to bring “the ambivalent nature of Roald Dahl’s life” to the screen.