Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, er, June Whitfield... Who would you cast as Margaret Thatcher in the biopic? Tells us at the foot of this article

She was loved, loathed, feared and even fetishised during her tenure as Britain’s most controversial Prime Minister – everything, in short, that an Oscar-hungry actress might look for in a role.

Now the chance to emulate Dame Helen Mirren’s award-laden success as the Queen has arrived with the announcement of The Iron Lady, the first film about another famous British female, Margaret Thatcher.

Damian Jones, the producer who also made Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, said that Meryl Streep was his first choice to play Baroness Thatcher, with Cate Blanchett a contender to play the daughter of a Grantham grocer as a younger woman. The script is yet to be written, but it will seek to flesh out the private side of Lady Thatcher that the public glimpsed only rarely.

Mr Jones said that it had been President Mitterrand’s description of Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, as a woman with “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe” that had prompted him to explore her character.

“I really don’t believe that anyone knows who she was. To this day she has kept the private side of her separate from the public,” he said.

The Iron Lady has been commissioned by Pathé, one of the film companies that financed The Queen, and by BBC Films.

Just as The Queen examined the monarch under unprecedented pressures in the days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, so The Iron Lady will focus on Lady Thatcher over a period of 17 days just before the Falklands conflict.

A spokesman for Pathé said that the 17-day period was chosen because it was the duration of the British fleet’s voyage to the Falklands.

“During that period, Thatcher had to confront her private fears, face down the men who doubted her and forge the image that even today casts a shadow across the political landscape.”

Mr Jones, who also produced Welcome to Sarajevo and Kidulthood, devised the concept with the scriptwriter Brian Fillis.

“Whatever you think of her there’s vast intrigue about what her make-up was and hopefully our film can unravel some of that,” Mr Jones said. “My first choice to play her would be Meryl Streep. Dame Helen Mirren is none too shabby either.” A film about the life and turbulent career of Ian Paisley could soon be starting production, with Liam Neeson in the starring role. Of two rival film projects using the Ulster politician’s life as raw material, the clear favourite is the one written by Gary Mitchell, the Belfast playwright, which is being backed by the Paisley family.

The Thatcher legacy on film

— Janet Brown in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only in 1981

— Steve Nallon in British television comedies from Spitting Image to The New Statesman during the 1980s

— Maureen Lipman in About Face: Send Her Victorious in 1989

— Patricia Hodge in The Falklands Play in 2002

— Kika Markham in The Line of Beauty in 2006

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