Michelle Pfeiffer to play former first lady Betty Ford for Showtime series
Michelle Pfeiffer is joining the “first wives club.”
The three-time Academy Award nominee has signed on to play Betty Ford in the upcoming Showtime series “The First Lady.”
The dramatic anthology, to be helmed by “Bird Box” director Susanne Bier, will also star Oscar winner Viola Davis as Michelle Obama, reported The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.
Ford, the wife of 38th president Gerald Ford, was an outspoken proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment and later co-founder of the Betty Ford Center, established to treat substance-abuse patients.
“Michelle Pfeiffer and Susanne Bier have joined the brilliant and incomparable Viola Davis to bring the remarkable stories of these women into urgent, engrossing and long overdue focus,” explained Showtime executive vice president of programming Amy Israel. “Michelle brings authenticity, vulnerability and complexity to all her roles.”
The first season of the series will chronicle American leadership through the eyes of the presidents’ wives, including Eleanor Roosevelt, according to Deadline.
Producers have yet to disclose who will portray Roosevelt, the iconic feminist who served as U.S. first lady longer than any other woman.
Despite Republican Gerald Ford’s general pro-life stance during his mid-1970s White House tenure, his wife was a vocal abortion proponent in the wake of the Roe v. Wade court case.
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Betty Ford was also frank in discussing her breast cancer following her 1974 mastectomy.
“When other women have this same operation, it doesn’t make any headlines. But the fact that I was the wife of a president put it in headlines and brought before the public this particular experience I was going through,” recalled Ford following her surgery. “It made a lot of women realize that it could happen to them. I’m sure I’ve saved at least one person, maybe more.”
Showtime has yet to release a premiere date for “The First Lady.”
