ALISON BOSHOFF: Kevin Spacey's dream of playing Sinatra is squashed after Frank's girl puts her foot down

Frank Sinatra's daughter Tina has nixed a biopic of her father — which was to have starred Kevin Spacey as the crooner.

The movie was to be directed by Taxi Driver and Raging Bull writer Paul Schrader and he indicated last week that he was ready to work with Spacey, despite the repeated (and repeatedly denied) allegations of sexual misbehaviour against him. ‘I would not use Kevin if he had been convicted. But he was not convicted,’ he said.

However, when I caught up with him at a dinner in Cannes this week, Schrader, 77, told me the project was not going ahead after all, because of opposition from Sinatra’s daughter.

‘We had a script which was great and we were ready to go, but Tina was not keen,’ he said. ‘We could not get her permission for the music and you can’t do it without that.

‘Tina is protective — very protective — of her father’s image and this was not an altogether flattering portrait of him. I think Kevin would have been good,’ he added. ‘He was a great Bobby Darin (in Beyond The Sea).’

The script focuses on Sinatra at the end of his career — post Mia Farrow — when he made several comebacks, while struggling with ill health and controversies.

Spacey was touched by Schrader’s support, which follows positive statements about him made by Liam Neeson, Stephen Fry and Sharon Stone. Speaking at a dinner hosted in his honour by fashion house Lanvin and film magazine A Rabbit’s Foot, Schrader said Spacey contacted him twice by email to express his gratitude. Schrader attended the Festival for his film Oh, Canada! which stars Richard Gere as a documentary-maker on his deathbed, and Jacob Elordi as a younger version of him.

Spacey is a jazz fan and a keen singer — the vocals on 2004’s Beyond The Sea were all his — and he’s been spotted singing Sinatra in bars in Baltimore.

The actor has not worked in Hollywood since several men accused him of sexual misconduct beginning in 2017.

In 2022, a New York court dismissed a sexual assault lawsuit brought by fellow actor Anthony Rapp. Last summer he was acquitted of nine charges brought against him in London.

This month ten more men came forward with claims of alleged abuse in Spacey Unmasked, a two-part Channel 4 documentary. Spacey slammed it as ‘one-sided’ and ‘inaccurate’.