Oscar winner Brie Larson to play America's first female presidential candidate

[March 24, 2017]  By Sebastien Malo

NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Academy Award-winning actress Brie Larson will star in a movie about the first woman to run for U.S. president decades before American women even had the right to vote.

Larson, 27, will play the lead in "Victoria Woodhull" about the 1872 presidential candidate in a film by Amazon Studios, according to online entertainment magazine Deadline.com.

Woodhull was the first woman to seek the U.S. presidency.

Last year, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, was the first woman to win the presidential nomination by a major political party.

A candidate of the Equal Rights Party, Woodhull was an unconventional reformer and champion of female suffrage. She lost to Republican Ulysses S. Grant.

"Victoria Woodhull" will be co-produced by Larson, who won an Oscar last year for her role as a captive mother in the movie "Room."

Women in the United States won the right to vote in 1920.

(Reporting by Sebastien Malo @sebastienmalo, Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)

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