Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Kenneth Branagh is in talks to star in and direct a movie entitled “Keeper of the Diary.” The film will depict the struggles of Otto Frank to find a publisher for his daughter’s diary, kept when she, along with her family and others, were hiding in the secret annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of Holland. The Franks and their friends were eventually caught and sent to concentration camps. Otto was the sole survivor of the group.
‘The Diary of Anne Frank’
Virtually every schoolchild has read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” written by a teenage Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in an upstairs apartment in Amsterdam during World War II.
The book describes her growing up in conditions of claustrophobia and fear while dealing with the usual feelings and stirrings that any teenager goes through. The book is about the Nazi Holocaust told in microcosm. The story and the tragedy of the author’s ending have ensured that the “Diary of Anne Frank” has never gone out of print. The book has undergone numerous adaptations for the stage, small and large screens.
“Keeper of the Diary”
The movie is going to tell the story of how Otto Frank, who had lost everything and everyone, struggled to bring his daughter’s story to the world. As with many subsequent works of great literature, it was not clear after World Wat II whether the diary would ever find a publisher.
Fortunately, Otto found an ally at the Doubleday publishing house in the form of Barbara Zimmerman, who had recently emerged out of the typing pool to become a junior editor. Zimmerman knew right away that the diary would change the world and, through dogged determination, made the publication happen. She later became a giant in the publishing business and was a founder of the New York Review of Books.
Kenneth Branagh has developed a host of great films
Branagh came to fame and fortune thanks to a movie version of “Henry V” which he directed and in which he played Shakespeare’s hero king. He has since developed an impressive body of work that has included other Shakespeare plays such as “Hamlet” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” thrillers such as “Dead Again.,” and fantasies such as “Thor.” He has acted in numerous films under other directors, such as “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” “Valkyrie,” and the upcoming “Dunkirk.” Branagh has recently completed a remake of “Murder on the Orient Express,” which her directed and in which he stars as the classic detective Hercule Poirot.
