Nicole Kidman and Gillian Anderson are set to appear in rival films about war correspondent and novelist Martha Gellhorn.

Oscar-winner Nicole has just been signed up along with Clive Owen to star in Hemingway And Gellhorn about one of American literature’s most famous couples, Deadline Hollywood reveals.

X Files star Gillian’s company bought the rights to Caroline Moorehead’s biography Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life in 2008 and hired Sharman Macdonald to write a feature adaptation for Gillian to star in as Gellhorn.

James Gandolfini is producing Hemingway And Gellhorn, which he has been working on for six years now and was originally attached to star in himself.

Philip Kaufman will direct from a script by Barbara Turner and Jerry Stahl and filming is due to start in Northern California next year.

Ernest Hemingway was already a literary legend when he met Gellhorn, a novelist and one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century, in a local bar in Key West in 1936.

Their tumultuous romance and subsequent five-year marriage took them to the Spanish Civil War, and Gellhorn’s competitive nature inspired Hemingway to pen one of his most famous novels, For Whom The Bell Tolls.