Producer Janette Day first began striving to make a feature version of the novel Vanity Fair a decade ago. She notes, "I've always felt that this was the period film I would like to make; there's nothing prim about it, and Becky Sharp is very much a modern heroine stuck in the wrong time, in a lavish mad world where she is feisty and difficult and different. The influence of the character in Vanity Fair is far-reaching and enduring."

For screenwriters and associate producers Matthew Faulk and Mark Skeet, adapting Vanity Fair "is a dream come true and in fact a privilege. The rich and comic array of characters that Thackeray provides is a screenwriter's dream. This is a novel about us all."

The new film version of the classic novel Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray introduces a new audience to the beautiful, funny, passionate, and calculating Becky. Vanity Fair is the first major adaptation of the author's work since Stanley Kubrick's 1975 feature Barry Lyndon. Faulk and Skeet admit, "Reducing a 900-page novel to a movie script was the main challenge. "

In the spring of 2002, plans for Vanity Fair coalesced at the newly formed Focus Features, where director Nair, whose Monsoon Wedding was finishing up a successful run worldwide, agreed to make and finance the film.

Day notes, "Vanity Fair had to be huge and lavish and funny and moving in terms of characters and storylines all having to interconnect and it had to have a real truth and humanity to it. If you watch Monsoon Wedding, Mira did all that, and you cared about every character."

Reese Witherspoon
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
Gabriel Byrne
James Purefoy
Romola Garai
Vanity Fair