Widow Clicquot and 10 more sparkling biopics: Life writes the plot

We’re raising a toast to the gorgeous biographical drama Widow Clicquot, based on the 2008 book The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J Mazzeo, which tells the story of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot (Haley Bennett), the woman who founded the Veuve Clicquot champagne empire.

After the death of her eccentric husband François (Tom Sturridge) in 1805, everyone expects 27-year-old Barbe-Nicole to step back and let the men take charge while she mourns. But after years of adoringly standing by her husband, listening to his raving, and watching his experiments, she has a much firmer grip than any of them do on the brilliant potential of their family’s vineyards. In the teeth of opposition from her father-in-law, banker Philippe Clicquot (Ben Miles), as well as a legal system that stripped women of rights and relegated them to the status of children, criminals and the mentally incompetent, Barbe-Nicole holds her ground.

She pushes back against hordes of whinging, foot-stomping  men. She fends off the encroachments of the neighbouring Moët family. And she tackles the trade embargoes during the Napoleonic wars that look set to stifle the wine industry. Barbe-Nicole tends her vineyard, sells everything she owns to keep her great love alive, and refines her processes until her genius, inspiration and determination turn champagne from a mere bubble into the sparkling heart of France’s luxury market. The word Veuve (widow) on the label of every bottle of Veuve Clicquot was required as a legal warning. She turned it into a badge of pride.

Widow Clicquot is an audaciously modern feeling story of cutthroat business manoeuvring for all its dreamy setting in the French countryside. And if anything, it undersells Barbe-Nicole’s story. Aside from her invention of three champagne making techniques that are still used today, there’s more to savour. She might have sold everything in her abbey to save her vines, but Barbe-Nicole earned enough back later in life to build a palatial French chateau – Château de Boursault – in honour of her granddaughter’s wedding. Guess who died a proverbial merry widow at the age of 88?

Could Hollywood ever write a better plot than real life does? If Widow Clicquot gives you a taste for the finer things, we’ve built a champagne tower of 10 of our most fascinating biographical dramas to enjoy. Take note: some bubbles of fiction have been slipped in to jazz things up (these aren’t documentaries), so just enjoy the fizz.

1. Moneyball

Brad Pitt plays the Oakland Athletics baseball team general manager Billy Beane in this biographical sports comedy based on Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (adapted by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin).

Billy and his assistant Peter Brand’s (a made-up character played by Jonah Hill) use of a sports analytics approach named sabermetrics to scout and hire the best players he could afford at the lowest cost created waves of resentment in the industry. Try it if you love the mix of humour, truth and style in sports docu-drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. 

Fun fact: While Moneyball plays fast and loose with the truth in places, the Oakland As’ 20-game winning streak really happened. 

2. Oppenheimer

Chris Nolan’s Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer dives into Dr Robert Openheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) personal struggles behind the Manhattan Project. Starting in 1943, the top secret Manhattan Project built three cities from scratch in the United States: Los Alamos in New Mexico, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, and Hanford and Richland in Washington State.

What exactly they were doing there stayed secret – even to most of the people living and working behind their fences – until 6 August 1945, when the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. If you’d like to know more, Chris Nolan drew heavily on Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer. 

Fun fact: US President Harry Truman really did refer to Oppenheimer as a “crybaby,” but only in a letter to Secretary of State Dean Acheson. 

3. The United States vs Billie Holiday

This biographical drama film, centred on jazz singer Billie Holiday, was based on a small section in Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Grammy Award-winning R&B artist Andra Day won the Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama, Golden Globe for her role as Billie, and created the original song Tigress and Tweed for the film.

The film starts with Billie being interviewed about her heartbreaking anti-lynching song Strange Fruit, and follows her determination to keep performing it in the face of government harassment, as she’s targeted by the FBI and eventually arrested on charges of drug use and possession. 

Fun fact: According to musician and historian Lewis Porter, Billie was never forced off stage during any performance of Strange Fruit nor was there any mention of the song in her FBI file. There’s also no evidence that she had an affair with narcotics agent Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes). 

4. Rocketman

Taran Egerton’s singing and attitude are both flawless in his Golden Globe-winning role as Sir Elton John in this musical fantasy biographical drama that focuses on the first half of the performer’s life. It’s a bigger, better take on rock star reality that’s more bedazzled than Elton’s sequinned glasses as it tackles his life from childhood (with the young Elton played by Matthew Illesley and Heartstopper’s Kit Connor) through his partnership with songwriter Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell), to fame highs and drug addiction lows, to his comeback era.

Produced by Elton John and his partner David Furnish, this passion project took nearly 20 years to make it to the big screen, and its combination of honesty, accuracy and rocket-fuelled energy earned it a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. 

Fun fact: Before Rocketman, Taran Egerton performed Elton John’s I’m Still Standing as Johnny the Gorilla in the animated movie Sing.

5. Bob Marley: One Love

Jamaica’s biggest star, Bob Marley, lives on through his reggae music and its calls for social justice, liberation and peace for all. His legacy is celebrated in the sensitive character portrait captured in this biographical docu-drama produced by Ziggy Marley and Brad Pitt. Kingsley Ben-Adir captures the essence of Bob Marley’s magnetism, with Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley and James Norton as Chris Blackwell. 

Whether we’re in the studio recording I Shot the Sheriff, sitting at a spiritual beach drum circle, playing soccer and swimming under waterfalls to Get Up, Stand Up, jogging through the street to Jammin’, or watching Bob Marley unite and move a concert crowd, the music forms a glowing thread that ties the film’s emotions together as it traces 10 years of the singer’s life between 1971 and his death from cancer in 1981. 

Fun fact: British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir shot this film back-to-back with Barbie (in which he played one of the Kens) and spent all his down time on the Barbie set bingeing Bob Marley interviews, recordings and music to get to grip with Bob’s Jamaican patois. He even hid a laptop behind the Mojo Dojo Casa House for quick access. 

6. Joika

Seen enough musician biopics? Try this dreamy, gritty biographical drama based on the life of American prima ballerina Joy Womack. Joy’s childhood training took her from the Austin School of Classical Ballet in Texas, to a scholarship to the Kirov Academy of Ballet of Washington, DC, to an invitation to study at Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet Academy at the age of 15.

Joy became the first-ever American woman to graduate from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy’s main training programme and the first American woman to sign a contract with the Bolshoi Ballet. But getting there was an ugly struggle. The film touches on Joy’s real-life battles with fellow students, the brutal training regimen under Tatiyana Volkova (Diane Kruger), and her decision to earn Russian citizenship through a Green Card marriage. Ballet’s glamour hurts like a fleck of glitter in your eye! 

Fun fact: Joy personally trained dancer and actress Talia Ryder, who played her in Joika, along with four stunt doubles, including former Moscow State Ballet dancer Aleksandra Ostatek. Joy also served as Talia’s dance double and as Joika’s choreographer and ballet consultant. 

7. Judy

Renée Zelwegger won the 2020 Best Actress Oscar for her role as troubled Hollywood former child star and singing legend Judy Garland (with Darci Shaw playing the young Judy). This biographical drama centres on Judy’s struggle years during her 40s, when she moved to London for a series of performances at the Talk of the Town cabaret theatre.

As well as the emotional fallout of her divorce following an abusive marriage, and having to leave her children back in the US (including daughter Lorna, played by Bella Ramsey), Judy was also plagued by worries about her voice following a tracheotomy, exhaustion following years of overwork, and the financial pressures caused by her managers’ embezzlement – which made carrying on her gruelling series of concerts a matter of survival. 

Fun fact: Judy’s British PA Rosalyn Wilder (played in Judy by Jessie Buckley) helped the film’s producers to track down essential people from that part of her life, from her dresser to the manager of Talk of the Town.

8. Spencer

Quick, what’s the connection between Princess Diana and the Twilight movies? The surprising answer is Kristen Stewart, in a multi-award-winning performance as the doomed British royal. The film is a snapshot of one of the most dramatic times in the Princess’s life – Christmas 1991, as Diana weighed up her decision to divorce then-Prince Charles (Jack Farthing).

Several members of Diana’s staff spoke out to praise Kristen’s portrayal, but don’t expect documentary-style realism – the movie is filled with fantasy sequences including ones in which Diana believes she’s being haunted by Anne Boleyn, memories of her childhood, and a moment in which she steals her father’s old jacket off a scarecrow, which winds up dressed in one of her outfits later in the film. 

Fun fact: Spencer’s writer Steven Knight (the creator of Peaky Blinders) interviewed staff who’d worked at Sandringham that Christmas to get a handle on the royal family’s holiday traditions.

9. Girl You Know It’s True

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, German dancer Rob Pilatus (Tijan Njie) and French choreographer Fab Morvan (Elan Ben Ali) shot to stardom as musical duo Milli Vanilli thanks to German music producer Frank Farian (Matthias Schweighöfer), the founder of smash hit disco group Boney M.

But as they partied in LA and basked in the spotlight of a Best New Artist Grammy Award, two singers named Brad Howell and John Davis were starting to mutter. Where was their award? It was their voices on every hit track that Rob and Fab were secretly lip synching to. When the backlash came, it was Rob and Fab who caught the blow rather than Frank, and this film does a lot to humanise the duo who became a public laughing stock. But it’s also a fun dive into the absurdity of 80s fame and excess. 

Fun fact: Several scenes in Girl You Know It’s True were filmed in and around Cape Town so look out for local spots like Sea Point pools and promenade, and local stars like Ashley Dowds as Milli Vanilli’s American manager Benny Dorn, Anel Alexander as a cafe owner, and Carel Nel as a security guard.

10. American Gangster

More “inspired by” than a biopic, director Ridley Scott’s action film tells the story of the rise and fall of New York drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington on one of his most celebrated roles), and his run-in with detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), who would later become his defence lawyer.

Lucas climbs the ladder to become the right hand man of the Godfather of Harlem, Bumpy Johnson – a tale that has been met with skepticism, along with Lucas’s claims that he was the mastermind behind the Golden Triangle heroin connection during the 1970s. But none of that should affect your enjoyment of this grippingly told gangster thriller, or its fascinating mid-70s Harlem locations.

Fun fact: Three former DEA agents filed a defamation lawsuit against Universal. While the case was dismissed, judge Colleen McMahon warned Universal not to place “inaccurate statements at the end of popular films”. It seems Frank Lucas did nothing helpful that led to the arrest of three quarters of the DEA’s agents on corruption charges. 

Also watch: Ray (Jamie Foxx plays musician Ray Charles), Back to Black (Marisa Abela plays singer Amy Winehouse), and Cadillac Records (Adrien Brody plays Len Chess, Jeffrey Wright plays Muddy Waters, and Beyoncé plays Etta James).