Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard won the best original screenplay Oscar for Shakespeare in Love during the Academy Awards, but novelist Faye Kellerman says the story belongs to her.
The best-selling author has filed a federal lawsuit against the makers of the film, claiming they stole the tale of a lovelorn bard from her 1989 Elizabethan-era novel The Quality of Mercy.
'It's interesting that it won the award, but as I said in the complaint it should have been for best adapted screenplay,' said Barry Novak, Kellerman's lawyer.
Named in the lawsuit are Norman and Stoppard, Miramax films, Universal City studios and script publisher Hyperion Press.
In both the novel and the movie, a young William Shakespeare romances a woman who masquerades as a man.
Miramax officials say the similarities end there.
'The two stories are so different that the idea one was copied from the other is absurd,' Miramax spokesman Andrew Stengel said on Monday.