Todd Haynes will direct Michelle Williams in a film about Peg­gy Lee

Actress Michelle Williams has been on a roll over the past cou­ple of weeks, hav­ing booked the lead in reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tor Kel­ly Reichardt’s new movie and now land­ed anoth­er major role with a film­mak­er who’s tak­en a shine to her. Todd Haynes is gear­ing up for anoth­er fea­ture, and he’s bump­ing Williams up from the sup­port­ing parts she played in I’m Not There and Won­der­struck to the head­lin­ing spot.

She’ll por­tray the singer Peg­gy Lee in Fever, an upcom­ing biopic chron­i­cling an event­ful life that allowed for star­dom in the worlds of both music and cin­e­ma. Dead­line had the exclu­sive that the long-in-devel­op­ment project has final­ly got­ten a green light with a script from I Am My Own Wife play­wright Doug Wright. (Reese With­er­spoon and Nora Ephron were attached, once upon a time.)

Lee was a mul­ti-hyphen­ate crooner/​songwriter/​composer in a career that spanned most of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, tak­ing her from the days of swing and big band into the ear­ly rum­blings of rock ​’n’ roll. Along the way, she found addi­tion­al suc­cess in Hol­ly­wood, where she earned an Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tion for Best Sup­port­ing Actress off her fine per­for­mance as a booze-addled song­bird in Pete Kelly’s Blues.

This project has got­ten off the ground with the help of an unusu­al, unex­pect­ed exec­u­tive pro­duc­er: Gram­my-fes­tooned Gen Z wun­derkind Bil­lie Eil­ish. The Dead­line item notes that Eil­ish, who claims Lee as a major inspi­ra­tion on her own work, par­tic­i­pat­ed in a salute to the elder talent’s life and pro­fes­sion­al accom­plish­ments last May, well-suit­ing her for her participation.

Haynes has shown a skill for avoid­ing the many pit­falls of the musi­cian biopic form over the years, from the inti­mate self-mythol­o­giz­ing of Vel­vet Gold­mine to the inno­v­a­tive pris­mat­ic struc­tur­ing of I’m Not There. Though Haynes has pulled back from writ­ing his own scripts as of late, he and Wright are sure to find some workaround that will dis­tin­guish their treat­ment of Lee’s time­less yet oft-told sto­ry from the many like it.