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Editor’s Update 2.3.19: Since opening in select theaters this past October, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”, starring Melissa McCarthy and directed by Marielle Heller, has been nominated for 22 awards, including 3 Academy Awards – Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay. The film is still playing in select theaters.

This just released official trailer offers a first look at the film adaptation of author Lee Israel’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger with Melissa McCarthy in the lead role.

From the Fox Searchlight film synopsis: “Melissa McCarthy stars in the adaptation of the memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the true story of best-selling celebrity biographer (and friend to cats) Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) who made her living in the 1970’s and 80’s profiling the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead, Estee Lauder and journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. When Lee is no longer able to get published because she has fallen out of step with current tastes, she turns her art form to deception, abetted by her loyal friend Jack (Richard E. Grant).”

According to a January 7, 2015 New York Times obituary about Lee Israel, “In the early 1990s, with her career at a standstill, she became a literary forger, composing and selling hundreds of letters that she said had been written by Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman and others. That work, which ended with Ms. Israel’s guilty plea in federal court in 1993, was the subject of her fourth and last book, the memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, published by Simon & Schuster in 2008.”

The big-screen version of Can You Ever Forgive Me? is directed by Marielle Heller and is expected to hit theaters October 19, 2018.

Lead photo credit: Can You Ever Forgive Me Movie Facebook page