It's definite: Sally Hawkins will play Anne Elliot

Confirmation in the Independent today in an interview with the actress.

She’s to play Anne Elliott in an upcoming adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Some more tidbits from the article.

For someone whose star is rising so rapidly, she’s not what you’d call an “actressy” actress. She’s a slip of a thing who looks rather younger than her age (she turned 30 this April), with clear, pale skin and angular features that can look strikingly pretty and – when occasion demands – frail and worn, even drab. The only flamboyant things about her are her jewellery (lots of it: big earrings, outsized ring, chunky bracelet which she breaks during the interview, sending it tinkling in pieces under the table); and her wild, curly mane of dyed blonde hair, a toned-down version of what she sported for Waz (“I looked insane – like I’d just stuck my head down the loo with a bottle of bleach”).

Sounds different from the picture we have here, eh? That looks more like Anne Elliot, to our mind.

She says that last sentence with a slight wobble in her voice, as well she might, having had a health scare over Christmas that left her facing the possibility that she might never act again – a chronic condition that she doesn’t want to name and which now, thankfully, seems to be responding to treatment.

Goodness! She’s Mrs. Smith!

It’s striking, I say, that for someone so upbeat and bubbly, who reacts so positively in the most part to people and life, the characters she’s played tend to be dark, or to go through severe struggle.

Interesting…Anne Elliot certainly goes through struggles, but she sort of blossoms as the story goes on, and gets stronger and more beautiful. It’s good to know that she can play dark but has a different personality, that she can bring both sides to the story.

As a woman, does she feel any pressure from the acting industry’s preoccupation with looks, I ask? “I do find it difficult when it’s less about acting and more about how you look. But I’m not a female lead. I don’t play romantic heroines, and that’s a good thing because they tend to be very dull parts. Except in Jane Austen! I’ve been lucky enough to have stepped around that. I play a range of characters. Some are prettier than others, some are quite plain. I’m lucky enough to have a face that can shift around.”

As a reminder, the film starts shooting in September 2006 and will be broadcast in the U.K. in 2007. No news on broadcast anywhere else in the world yet.