ByHANNAH BROWN

 Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman will play the lead in an HBO Films production of Elena Ferrante’s novel, The Days of Abandonment, Variety announced on Tuesday. 

Portman, who made her directorial debut with a Hebrew-language adaptation of Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, will executive produce the film in addition to starring in it.

The Days of Abandonment, about a wife who abandons her own dreams to raise a family and is shocked when her husband suddenly leaves her, was published in 2002 and preceded Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet novels, about the intense lifelong friendship between two girls from a Naples slum, which became international bestsellers. HBO made a successful Italian-language adaptation of the first two novels in the quartet, called My Brilliant Friend, after the title of the first book.

Ferrante is a pseudonym and there has been much speculation as to the identity of the author. In 2016, journalist Claudio Gatti published an article in which he asserted that Ferrante was likely the Italian translator Anita Raja, who is daughter of a Polish Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust and a Neapolitan father. Gatti based his theory partly on Raja’s Neapolitan background and partly on fact that there was a sudden increase in payments to her from Ferrante’s publisher, for whom Raja has worked as a consultant and translator, just as the Ferrante novels became bestsellers. There have also been rumors that Raja’s husband, novelist Domenico Starnone, who will be a guest at the International Writers Festival in Jerusalem next month, may have written Ferrante’s books or collaborated with Raja on them. Raja and Starnone have denied the claim.

Just last month, it was announced that Portman, who won a Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan,  will star in the Apple limited series Lady in the Lake, which is based on the novel of the same name by Laura Lippman. Portman is currently in Australia, filming the movie Thor: Love and Thunder.