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New Nico Biopic Will Depict Her Life After Velvet Underground

 

Velvet Underground cohort Nico will be the subject of a new biopic entitled Nico, 1988. The movie will star Danish actor Trine Dyrholm, and will reportedly focus on the singer’s final years during which she struggled with heroin addiction and maintaining her solo career.

“Most people think, as Andy Warhol once said, that after her experience with Velvet Underground and the Factory —and after having had sex with most of the rock stars of those years — Nico simply ‘became a fat junkie’ and disappeared,” the film’s Susanna director Nicchiarelli said in a statement. “But is this how her life really went?”

While Variety reports the film will begin in 1987, the year before Nico’s death, when the singer launched a solo tour while attempting to kick heroin, we hope the movie also sheds light on some of the lesser known moments of her early life and career, like the time she reportedly stabbed another singer in the eye with a broken glass in a fit of racist rage.

As The Guardian noted, music manager Danny Fields says Nico attacked a mixed race singer at a dinner party sometime in the early 1970s. “Nico was, I dunno, feeling neglected, or drunk, but suddenly she said ‘I hate black people,’ and smashed a wineglass on the table and stuck it in the girl’s eye. There was lots of blood and screaming,” Fields said. “Fortunately she just twisted it around her eye socket, so the glass never reached [the eye] but it’s not like she was being cautious.”

Though the film will reportedly use flashbacks, it seems unlikely anything like the above scene will make the cut. “The entire film is constructed following the inspiration of Nico’s music: her performances and the lyrics of her songs,” Nicchiarelli said in her statement. “It will tell us more than any other dialogue or situation in the film.”

Nico, 1988 is set to begin filming early next month.