Olivier Dahan has begun shooting “Grace in Monaco,” starring Nicole Kidman as Princess Grace (the former Grace Kelly) and Tim Roth as her husband, Prince Rainier III. Following her appearance at the Emmys, Kidman joined the cast at the Victorine Studio in Nice, which is where Alfred Hitchcock filmed Kelly opposite Cary Grant in 1955’s “To Catch a Thief.”

Dahan is best know here for directing “La Vie en rose,” the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic that brought Marion Cotillard the Best Actress Oscar.

Last week, Variety announced that Parker Posey and Milo Ventimiglia had joined the “Grace in Monaco” cast. Posey will play Madge Tivey-Faucon, Grace’s scheming lady-in-waiting. Ventimiglia will play Grace’s publicist, Rupert Allan, who served as consul general for Monaco and was made a Chevalier of the Order of Grimaldi in honor of his service by the prince in 1989. In a stroke of inspired (or crazy) casting, Paz Vega plays Maria Callas, who during her relationship with Aristotle Onassis was a confidante of the princess. Frank Langella has the role of a priest.

Hitchcock will be portrayed by Roger Ashton-Griffiths. The British character actor and former opera singer thus becomes the third thesp in quick succession to play the director, following Toby Jones in “The Girl” (about his sexual harassment of Tippi Hedren) and Anthony Hopkins in “Hitchcock” (about the making of “Psycho”).

“Grace of Monaco,” written by Arash Amel (and a Black List screenplay), is set during set 1962 when the princess experienced a personal crisis. Cineeuropa recently published this synopsis:

“Six years after what was called the wedding of the century, Grace Kelly does her best to reconcile her past with her present, torn between her nostalgia for her life as a film star and her new role of mother to two children, monarch of a European principality, and the wife of Prince Rainier III. While she ponders Alfred Hitchcock’s offer to return to a career in Hollywood, she experiences deep personal crisis, at a time when Rainier’s attempts to modernize Monaco (then in trouble) are threatened by the French president Charles de Gaulle. The latter imposes French tax on Monaco and tries to annex the principality by force.

“This international crisis and the risk of an imminent French invasion will not only threaten the monarch's marriage, his family, and the future of his country, but also affect Princess Grace’s private life. The international film icon, an American far away from home, must make a difficult decision: to return to being a glorious film star, an artist loved and admired by the entire world, or to renounce this status forever to embrace her new identity.”

Although Kidman’s choices have been varied, she has seldom played real people – the few include Virginia Woolf (her Oscar-winning turn), Diane Arbus, and Martha Gellhorn. Playing Grace Kelly will be the closest she has come to channeling her own strange experience as Hollywood royalty into the role of a woman who also had a complex relationship with stardom, given that Kelly exchanged one kind of celebrity for another. It could therefore be the closest Kidman has come to enacting a kind of professional psychodrama. The result could be revelatory.