Actress Nicole Kidman is in talks to play photographer Diane Arbus in the movie "Fur," The Hollywood Reporter said Monday.

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Robert Downey Jr. is also in talks for the project with Steven Shainberg set to direct his first feature since the 2002 film "Secretary."

Arbus was a fashion photographer during the post-World War II era, who changed her focus in the 1950s to decidedly unfashionable subjects -- including transvestites and asylum patients.

Her commercial and artistic success in the 1960s included an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she taught photography at such schools as the Parsons School of Design in New York and Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

Arbus died at 48 in 1971, after cutting her wrists and overdosing on barbiturates.

"Fur" is being written by Shainberg's "Secretary" collaborator Erin Cressida Wilson, from Patricia Bosworth's book "Diane Arbus: A Biography."