Colin Firth and 'sea widow' Kate Winslet hit choppy waters in new film

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By BAZ BAMIGBOYE
PUBLISHED: 17:41 EST, 31 October 2013 | UPDATED: 17:41 EST, 31 October 2013

Colin Firth and Kate Winslet are in very early discussions about starring in a film based on an infamous yacht-racing cheat whose misadventure on the high seas more than four decades ago still haunts his family.

The actors, both Oscar winners, have read a screenplay by Scott Burns about how Donald Crowhurst duped his family, race organisers and the public into believing that he had spent 240 days circumnavigating the globe in a prestigious single-handed, non-stop odyssey.

Firth would portray Crowhurst, with Winslet playing his wife, Clare — who was known at the time as the ‘sea widow’.

Crowhurst set out in 1968 and was expected to return home the following year after the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race.
The public’s imagination had been fired by reports of  derring-do on the high seas, following Francis Chichester’s triumphant sea-faring voyage, and so tales of incredible endurance on treacherous oceans were as exciting to follow as, say, last year’s London Olympics.

Of the nine competitors in the race, Crowhurst was the worst equipped and the least qualified. His trimaran, Teignmouth Electron, was slow, and then it sprung a leak.

‘This bloody boat is just falling to pieces!’ he wrote in his log.
He was so far behind the others that he set in motion a plan to deceive the world by falsifying his locations on the ship-to-shore messages sent from his Marconi radio (remember: this was the pre-digital age!).

Crowhurst slowly went mad, trying to keep up with his deceptions about his whereabouts. It’s a fascinating story, and was massive at the time.


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