Nicole Kidman is being lined up to play 1960s singer Dusty Springfield in a new film about her life.

The movie is being written by Michael Cunningham, the man behind the Oscar-winning film The Hours in which Kidman played writer Virginia Woolf.

Reports suggest the movie will depict Springfield's rise to fame, her battle with drink and drugs as well as her bisexual affairs.

"It will be the real Dusty, a great artist who no one knew what to do with," Cunningham said.

"But she is going into history with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones."

Born Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien in 1939, Springfield first came to fame with her 1963 hit 'I Only Want To Be With You'.

Celebrated for her unique soulful voice, she was on of the best selling female singers of the 1960s and in her later years made a comeback by working with the Pet Shop Boys in the late 1980s.

It was widely regarded that Springfield was bisexual, having been open about having relationships with men and women in the press.

In 1970 she told the Evening Standard: "A lot of people say I'm bent, and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it."

"I know I'm perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don't see why I shouldn't."

She died from breast cancer in 1999 in the same year she received an OBE from the Queen.