Selena Gomez has been cast as Linda Ronstadt in an upcoming biopic.
Fans had begun suspecting the casting after Gomez posted a photo on her Instagram featuring Ronstadt’s 2013 memoir Simple Dreams. The film, which is currently in pre-production, will be produced by Ronstadt’s manager, John Boylan, and James Keach.
No further details on the film’s release date have been revealed.
Ronstadt announced her retirement from music in 2011. Two years later, she stated that she’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which left her unable to sing. Her last album, Adieu False Heart, was released in 2006. Her final live concert took place in 2019.
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“I’ve just accepted it. There’s absolutely nothing I can do,” Ronstadt explained to The New Yorker in 2019. “I have a form of Parkinsonism that doesn’t respond to standard Parkinson’s meds, so there’s no treatment for what I have. It’s called P.S.P.—Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. I just have to stay home a lot. … My friends come over and play music, and that’s where I like it best, anyway: in the living room.”
Ronstadt has since found other ways to be creative. In 2022, she put out another book, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands, part memoir, part cookbook with recipes derived from her childhood. (Ronstadt, like Gomez, is of Mexican descent.)
“I passed for white, growing up in Tucson, when it was very segregated,” she told Rock Cellar that year. “My name; the way I look. So, this was a way for me to more deeply explore my Mexican heritage, and to help humanize a culture that is part of me and that I truly love.”
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