Nicole Kidman is set to play Grace Kelly, the Oscar-winning Hollywood actor who gave it all up for a life as princess of Monaco, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Grace of Monaco, by screenwriter Arash Amel, was on the 2011 Black List of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood. It follows the format of recent films such as My Week with Marilyn and The King's Speech, both of which examined a famous 20th-century figure by focusing on a particular moment in their lives. The story on this occasion centres on a six-month period in 1962 when French leader Charles de Gaulle and Monaco's Prince Rainier III were at odds over the opulent principality's standing as a tax haven. Kelly, then 33 and in the first flush of her royal career, was said to have been instrumental behind the scenes in solving the political impasse.

The film has the air of classic Oscar-bait and is being directed by Olivier Dahan, whose Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose saw Marion Cotillard take home the Academy Award for best actress in 2008. Kidman won the same Oscar in 2003 for her role as Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, and was nominated separately for the best actress and best supporting actress prizes in 2002 and 2011.

Dahan's film is likely to follow Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, which centres on Kelly's famed collaborator and production of his iconic 1960 horror, into cinemas. Anthony Hopkins is to play the British director in the latter film, with Scarlet Johansson as Janet Leigh. Kelly starred in three films for Hitchcock, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, before quitting Hollywood to marry Rainier in 1955. She died in an a car accident in 1982 and her funeral was watched on television by 30 million people.