Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz are attached to star in the feature "Elegy," based on "The Human Stain" author Philip Roth's 2001 novel "The Dying Animal" reports Production Weekly.

Kingsley plays David Kepesh, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college who meets Consuela Castillo (Cruz), a decorous, well-mannered student and daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.

Since the 1960's Kepesh has experimented with living an abstinent life in pursuit of a higher understanding, but the youth and beauty of Consuela undo him completely, and a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy.

Spanish director Isabel Coixet ("The Secret Life of Words") is scheduled to begin six weeks of principal photography April 24th in Vancouver.