Jessica Lynch - the movie

2003-08-07 14:15

California - Actress Laura Regan will play Private Jessica Lynch, the 19-year-old US Army supply clerk captured by Iraqi forces, in the NBC movie Saving Jessica Lynch.

Regan, who starred in the 2002 horror movie They, was cast in the lead role of the TV movie centring on Lynch's April 1 rescue, network spokesperson Cathryn Boxberger said on Tuesday.

NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker said last month the film will be a compelling action-adventure told from the perspective of Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who alerted the US military to Lynch's whereabouts.

The film, being made without Lynch's participation, will focus less on her and more on the experience of her Army unit and her rescuers, Zucker has said.

Lynch was captured on March 23 after her 507th Maintenance Company convoy was ambushed in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. Al-Rehaief alerted US forces that she was in a hospital in the city.

She returned home last month to Palestine, West Virginia, after a long hospitalisation in Washington, DC

Saving Jessica Lynch, with executive producer Dan Paulson, is scheduled to start production this month. It will be broadcast in the United States in November.

- AP