THEY’RE turning Simon Doonan into a sitcom – and just as Cate Blanchett portrayed Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There,” the Barneys creative director hopes an Oscar-winning actress will play him in “Beautiful People,” a BBC series based on his life.
“I keep thinking Linda Hunt – or somebody fabulous like that,” Doonan told Page Six, noting that Hunt won an Oscar for her riveting turn as a male Chinese-Australian dwarf in “The Year of Living Dangerously.”
“Linda would be great – and she’s about my size. I’m just 5-foot-4½ on my passport, and, believe me, that half inch is very important,” the flamboyant fashionista said.
“Beautiful People,” which will debut on TV this fall, is based on Doonan’s memoir, “Nasty: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints,” which chronicled his upbringing in working-class Reading, England. “I’m delightfully uninvolved in its planning. I haven’t lived in England since the ’70s, so I don’t know what presses people’s buttons anymore. I can barely understand Amy Winehouse. I’m sort of an old fart.”
Doonan, 55, expects the series to be “deranged, wacky and brilliant” since it’s being helmed by Jon Plowman, who produced “The Office” and “Absolutely Fabulous.”
“I’m sure they’ll take some liberties – they might even have me play my own grandmother,” Doonan said. But will he be ready for the fame if the sitcom scores big?
“The good thing is that since I’m always in the display windows at Barneys, they can walk by and wave at me. Or I can throw bonbons at them. I’m not going to be like Greta Garbo or anything,” he said.
Meanwhile, in his new book, “Eccentric Glamour,” Doohan asks actors, models and fashion experts where they want to be buried and in what. Oscar winner Tilda Swinton tells him: “[Put me] in a shallow grave of sand, done up to the nines in a huge flowery chiffon dress, stretched out like a sail on a beach in the Hebrides, pecked to pieces by birds.” Says Lucy Liu: “I wish to be cryogenically frozen in Nan Kempner’s closet, and when I wake up, I can choose from her incredible collection.”
And Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point,” cracks: “I love the Bobst Library at NYU more than just about anywhere. I’d like to be buried in the current-periodicals room, maybe next to the unbound volumes of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.”