THE director of Calendar Girls has signed up four of Britain’s leading actresses for a similarly life-affirming film about a group of women determined to take control of their fate.

Yesterday, at the Cannes film festival, Nigel Cole announced that Miranda Richardson, Rosamund Pike, Andrea Riseborough and Sally Hawkins would appear in a film telling the story of a strike by a group of sewing-machine operators at the Ford plant in Dagenham, east London.

The action in 1968 was a landmark in the battle for equal pay between the sexes.

The film will be called We Want Sex. Its title comes from the banner that the striking women took with them to Westminster to protest for better conditions.

The full wording was “We Want Sex Equality” but the last word could not be seen in photographs because the banner was not properly unfurled.

The film was announced in Cannes by its producer, Stephen Woolley, whose previous movies include The Crying Game and Mona Lisa.

He said the film would be “both dramatic and humorous”. He added: “The strike was a turning point for women and the way they brought to notice their conditions at the factory.”

Hawkins, who plays one of the workers, was seen last year in Happy-Go-Lucky, a Mike Leigh film in which she played a teacher, a role for which she won a Golden Globe.

“We are tying to make a film here which has very wide appeal, especially for women,” said Cole, who hopes his movie will have a similar “feel-good and inspirational” plot to Calendar Girls, which told the true story of a group of Women’s Institute members who stripped off for a calendar and has now been turned into a West End show.

The 1968 strike in support of pay closer to that of men with similar skills brought the Dagenham plant and then the whole of Ford in Britain to a halt for three weeks.

The plant itself will not be used as a location for the film when filming starts in six weeks. Instead, it will be made at an old Hoover factory at Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales.

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