New role for Dunst

Actress Kirsten Dunst is to play a young US relief worker killed by a suicide bomb in Baghdad in a new film about the Iraq war.

Marla Ruzicka, 28, from California, spearheaded a door-to-door project to obtain first-hand accounts of casualties in the war-torn country, lobbying the US government for compensation.

The organisation she founded, the Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict, raised $28m (€23m) to assist civilian casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ruzicka and her translator were killed in April when a suicide bomber crashed into their convoy.

Her life and work has since attracted widespread international coverage.

The yet untitled film will be made for Paramount Pictures which has also bought the rights to a book about Ruzicka’s life, according to trade publication Variety.

Dunst is currently starring alongside Orlando Bloom in Elizabethtown.

She recently finished filming Marie Antoinette, directed by Sophia Coppola and will soon star in Spider Man 3.