Sinéad O’Connor's life will be the subject of a new biopic by the filmmakers behind the 2022 documentary Nothing Compares.
The film follows the news that the late Irish singer, who passed away in 2023 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, instructed her family to "milk [her music] for what it’s worth" in her will.
Produced by BBC FIlm and ie: entertainment, the film has actually been in the works as long as the documentary. Josephine Decker (Shirley) has signed on to direct it, with Irish writer Stacey Gregg tackling the screenplay.
According to Variety, the film will "explore O’Connor’s early life and beginnings in the music industry. It will look to tell the story of how one young woman from Dublin took on the world, examining how her global fame may have been built on her talent, but her name became synonymous with her efforts to draw attention to the crimes committed by the Catholic Church and the Irish state."
The biopic will certainly have its fair share of drama to it, a lot of which O'Connor detailed in her best-selling 2021 memoir, Rememberings.
In her nearly 40 years as a recording artist, O'Connor released 10 studio albums. She became a global sensation in 1990 with the release of "Nothing Compares 2 U," a song written by Prince, that went to #1 across the globe. (The story behind that song alone is enough for a feature film.)
That song's success helped her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, sell 7 million copies worldwide and garner four Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year. The album won Best Alternative Music Performance, the following year, however, O'Connor refused it.
With success, O'Connor found herself the subject of controversy. At the height of her fame, she tore up a photo of the Pope during a performance on Saturday Night Live in October 1992, declaring "Fight the real enemy." She claimed it was an act of protesting the sexual abuse of children at the hand of the Catholic Church. The antic saw her banned from NBC and two weeks later, booed off stage at a Bob Dylan concert. She also had public spats with Madonna, Prince and Miley Cyrus.
Born Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor, the singer changed her name twice. In 2017, she became Magda Davitt as a way to be "free of the patriarchal slave names, free of the parental curses," she explained. And then in 2018 she took the name Shuhada before changing her surname to Sadaqat in 2019, after converting to Islam.