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The Viola Drath Murder Case Is Being Made Into a Movie

Tarantino regular Christoph Waltz will star in and direct the movie.

That's a bingo. Photograph by cinemafestival via Shutterstock.

The 2011 murder of 91-year-old Georgetown socialite Viola Drath by her husband, Albrecht Muth, will get a cinematic treatement at the hands of actor Christoph Waltz, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Waltz will both direct the movie and portray Muth, the German fabulist who was convicted for Drath’s murder in January 2014 and later sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Drath and Muth married in 1990, when she was 70 and he was 26. Besides the substantial age difference, their marriage turned heads in Georgetown for Muth’s oddball antics, like marching down the sidewalks wearing military uniforms that seemed borrowed from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and claiming to be a general in the Iraqi army. (The Embassy of Iraq routinely denied Muth’s claims.) Muth’s trial was equally sensational, with psychiatrists repeatedly reversing the ruling of whether he was fit to stand trial.

Waltz’s movie is tentatively titled The Worst Marriage in Georgetown, after a 2012 New York Times Magazine article by Franklin Foer from which it will be adapted. Production is expected to begin this October. Waltz, 58, is best known to US audiences for his Oscar-winning roles in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. He is also set to appear this year in Spectre, the latest James Bond film in which he plays “Oberhauser,” a villain who may or may not actually be Ernst Stavro Blofeld. (But definitely is Blofeld.)

Staff Writer

Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.