Catherine McCormack has signed to star as the daughter of Richard Harris and Lynn Redgrave in UK gangster movie My Kingdom which is being directed by Don Boyd and produced by Neal Weisman of Close Grip Films, Gabriela Bacher of Primary Pictures and BSkyB's film production arm Sky Pictures. Overseas Filmgroup is handling international sales on the project at Cannes.

McCormack will play Cath, the eldest of the three daughters of Harris' crime lord in the movie, a contemporary update of King Lear set in Liverpool. Boyd wrote the screenplay with acclaimed journalist Nick Davies.

"We have taken the story of Lear and plundered it and added real stories from Liverpool," explained Boyd. "British film-makers have never done with their cities what Scorsese has done with New York or Wong Kar-Wai with Hong Kong or Fassbinder with Berlin. We don't seem to celebrate our iconography as well as we could. Liverpool has a great heritage and witty, idiosyncratic characters. When I began to work on a modern Lear, that seemed the perfect place to sell it."

McCormack has just finished a role in John Boorman's The Tailor Of Panama, an adaptation of the John Le Carre novel which Columbia Pictures plans to release in the US at the end of the year. She has also starred in Kathryn Bigelow's The Weight Of Water, E Elias Merhige's Shadow Of The Vampire (screening this week in Directors Fortnight), David Kane's This Year's Love, Pat O'Connor's Dancing At Lughnasa and Mel Gibson's Braveheart.