Kidman 'to play vice girl Fleiss'

Heidi Fleiss' story became a Hollywood scandal

Nicole Kidman is being lined up to play the infamous Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss in a new film, it has been reported.

Fleiss, who was jailed in 1997 after supplying call girls to some of the world's richest men, has sold her story to Paramount Pictures for a film called Pay the Girl, according to Hollywood publication Variety.

She told Variety that the prospect of Kidman playing her was a "major enticement" to sell her story.

Kidman's new film, The Hours, is tipped for Oscar nominations

Fleiss, 37, said the film should be "like Pretty Woman, but with the visual energy and excess of Scarface".

"All of the madam movies have been like B-level porn or they've been boring. The world I was living in was not boring," she told Variety.

Fleiss was attested in 1993 and her scandalous story sent shockwaves through Hollywood, implicating some of the most important men in the film industry.

She is now to get into publishing, she told Variety, with a memoir called Pandering.

She said: "I cornered the market and stayed on top for two and a half years."

"I ran my business dealing with the top 1% of the richest people in the entire world, people who run countries and whose actions change economies.

Major projects

"It was very intoxicating and the money was huge. Then I went to prison."

Kidman has already got a string of major movie projects in the pipeline, and will soon be seen playing author Virginia Woolf in Oscars-tipped The Hours.

She will also be seen in Lars von Trier's Dogville, Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain, a remake of The Stepford Wives and in romantic drama The Human Stain with Anthony Hopkins.

And she is expected to star in an epic about Alexander the Great in 2004.

Fleiss was the subject of a documentary by UK film-maker Nick Broomfield in 1995.