Angelina Jolie is... Marcella Fierro?

Articles from Boomer Magazine in Richmond, VA

What do Angelina Jolie and Marcella Fierro have in common?

If you answered Kay Scarpetta, you’re correct.

The Oscar-winning actress has been chosen to play the crime-solving medical examiner Scarpetta in a movie based on novelist Patricia Cornwell’s popular series. Scarpetta is modeled after Dr. Fierro, Virginia’s chief medical examiner from 1994 until her retirement in December 2007.

Fierro, who has advised Cornwell on her Scarpetta books starting with Postmortem in 1990, has a 20-plus-year friendship with the writer that started with Cornwell’s work as a computer analyst in the medical examiner’s office in Richmond.

Fierro acknowledges that she is flattered by the choice of Jolie to play her in the Fox 2000 prequel to Cornwell’s novels, which reportedly is set in the present day with a more youthful Scarpetta.

“I think it’s wonderful that Scarpetta is going to the big screen,” the 69-year-old Fierro said.

While it’s “a little too early” to talk about whether she’ll be an adviser on the movie, Fierro said she wasn’t asked for her stamp of approval for Jolie. Neither was she asked to vet the other actresses—Jodie Foster, Demi Moore, Glenn Close and Kristin Scott Thomas—who reportedly had beenin the mix to play Scarpetta at one time or another.

“Anything that’s satisfactory with Ms. Cornwell is satisfactory with me,” Fierro said.

Any similarities between her and Jolie?

“Between her and me?” Fierro asks incredulously. “Oh, don’t I wish I looked like Angelina Jolie,” she replies. “I’d even take the tattoos!”