GERARD BUTLER TAPS LONDON PHANTOM
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[ November 26th 2004 ]

Two relative unknowns have been chosen to star in the screen version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical 'The Phantom of the Opera'. John Hiscock reports They seem an unlikely couple: the happy-go-lucky Scotsman who used to sing in a rock band, and the opera-trained American teenager. Yet when Emmy Rossum saw Gerard Butler lurking in the shadows at her screen test in New York, she knew he was the man to play the Phantom to her Christine.

Andrew Lloyd Webber has gambled by choosing two relative unknowns, neither of whom had seen his hit stage musical, to star in his long-awaited £45 million film version of The Phantom of the Opera, about a disfigured musical genius who haunts the Paris opera house. His original choices when the film was first considered 16 years ago were his then-wife Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford. Now it is up to the cinema-goer to decide whether Gerard Butler and 18-year-old Emmy Rossum - she was 16 when she won the role - will go down in history as one of cinema's famous couples.

Read the full article at The Telegraph