Kate Winslet takes Nicole Kidman’s role in The Reader

It seems Kate Winslet might be the lucky beneficiary of Nicole Kidman's pregnancy, announced earlier this week. Winslet is reported to be stepping into the film role just vacated by Kidman as a woman who has an affair with a teenage boy in The Reader. A spokeswoman for the English actress says that the part was actually written for Winslet in the first place, but she had had to turn it down because it conflicted with the filming of Revolutionary Road (pictured).

Now that Kidman, 40, has backed out for the sake of her unborn child, Winslet gets the chance to play the part after all. Adapted by David Hare from Bernhard Schlink's 1995 bestseller set in post-war Germany, the film tells the story of a woman who carries on a love affair with a 15-year-old boy. Years later he learns she was a defendant in a Holocaust war crimes trial.

Kidman's baby will be her first, though she adopted two children while married to Tom Cruise. Winslet, 32, earned the latest of five Academy Award nominations for her performance in Little Children as a woman caught in a loveless marriage.