Denial: Hilary Swank and Tom Wilkinson to star in film about Holocaust denier David Irving

Irving filed an unsuccessful libel suit against historian Deborah Lipstadt in 1996

Tuesday 28 April 2015 12:56 BST

Hilary Swank is attached to play historian Deborah Lipstadt in Denial (Getty Images)

Hilary Swank is set to lead new film drama Denial, based on Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.

The Oscar-winning actress will play US historian Lipstadt, who famously battled Holocaust denier David Irving in court after he sued both her and Penguin Books for libel.

The story follows Lipstadt and her lawyers’ fight to prove that the Holocaust happened and Irving had tried to erase history by deliberately manipulating evidence “for his own ideological reasons”.

Tom Wilkinson, known recently for Selma, is attached to star as Irving, whose case was ultimately unsuccessful and discredited him as a Nazi Germany expert.

The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

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1/7The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

David Irving

The controversial historian took exception to a book published by Penguin in 1994, in which the American academic, Deborah Lipstadt, described him as a “Hitler partisan” and Holocaust denier who deliberately falsified the historical record. Irving sued in 2000, hoping that a court would accept that he was expressing an honest opinion. He lost, landing himself with a £2m legal bill.

John Voos/The Independent

The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan Aitken with his wife Lolicia outside the High Court in 1997, before the collapse of his libel suit against ‘The Guardian’

Rex Features

The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

Jeffrey Archer

The best-selling author and former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party seemed to prove to the nation that suing a tabloid newspaper for libel was an easy way to get rich. In the end, however, his lies caught up with him. In 2001, he was sent to prison for perjury, and he had to repay the newspaper £1.5m.

PA

The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

Oscar Wilde

In 1895, the flamboyant playwright and aesthete started one of the most foolish libel actions in legal history when he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for leaving a calling card with the misspelt message “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite”. Losing the case not only bankrupted him: it led to his arrest and imprisonment for his active homosexuality.

Getty Images

The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

James McNeill Whistler

In 1877, the painter, a contemporary of Oscar Wilde, sued the critic John Ruskin, who had accused him of being a “coxcomb” who asked for “two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. The jury found in in his favour

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The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

Bruce Grobbelaar

The popular Liverpool goalkeeper was accused by The Sun in 1994 of having been paid to fix matches. He was acquitted in the criminal trial that followed. He decided to sue The Sun. He won £85,000 libel damages in 1999. That verdict was overturned by a Court of Appeal, but reinstated by the House of Lords. However, the law lords reduced his damages to £1 and ordered him to pay The Sun’s legal costs of £500,000. Victory left him bankrupt.

Getty Images

The winners and losers: Libel litigants who paid a high price

Andrew Neil

The then editor of The Sunday Times, an unmarried man, was sometimes seen in the company of Pamella Bordes, a former Miss India who held a House of Commons pass. A scandal broke when it emerged that she was also a high-earning prostitute. Neil had not known that, and sued the Sunday Telegraph columnist Peregrine Worsthorne, who had written that “playboys” should not edit newspapers. He won £1,000 damages.

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Mick Jackson is on board to direct, Oscar-nominated David Hare is penning the screenplay and Gary Foster and Russ Krasnoff will produce, Deadline reports.

“This is a powerful story about the legal and personal battle Deborah Lipstadt fought to defend the veracity of historical facts,” the producers said.

“No one has the right to erase history by distorting the truth and David Hare’s brilliant script weaves a relevant and thrilling journey.”

Swank was last seen on the silver screen starring alongside Tommy Lee Jones in The Homesman while Wilkinson is busy filming his role as Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill in Oliver Stone’s Snowden, about the former CIA employee who leaked classified US documents to the press.

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