Hollywood Films Old English Epic

She camped her way through the film Alexander wreathed in snakes and pouting like fury as the hero's sinister, overpowering mother. She has played opposite Brad Pitt as a hardened assassin posing as a chintzy wife, a portrayal described by Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw as "fascinatingly and authentically barking mad".

Now Angelina Jolie - subject of a delighted feeding frenzy in the tabloids as rumours abound that she is pregnant with Pitt's child - is to star in another sword-slinging epic, this time Beowulf.

The film, one of two in the pipeline based on the epic Old English poem, is directed by Robert Zemeckis and financed by the millionaire American Steve Bing through his company Shangri-La Entertainment.

Ray Winstone, the British actor, is to play the hero Beowulf, who kills the man-eating monster Grendel and his equally nasty mother ("the swamp thing from hell, the tarn-hag in all her terrible strength", in Seamus Heaney's translation). He becomes a wise and prosperous king, ruling for 50 years, before being slain by a dragon.

Winstone is to start shooting in late September. The film uses stop-motion technology, meaning the cast will act in the studio in front of screens before special effects are added.

Also starring are Anthony Hopkins and Brendan Gleeson. The film is likely to be in the ever more popular vein of epic fantasy-inflected films such as The Lord of the Rings.

Ms Jolie's part is as yet unclear. Apart from Grendel's mother, the monstrous "tarn-hag", the female characters in the original poem, thought to have been composed in England between the 7th and 10th centuries, are largely jewellery-adorned, gracious queens who are liberal with the mead.

That said, reference is made to the Great Queen Modthryth, who would torture on the rack and have killed by the sword any man who dared look at her. No doubt the scriptwriter, Roger Avary, who collaborated with Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction, will have other ideas for Ms Jolie.