Hologram of Amy Winehouse to tour and biopic of her life to be made

Amy Winehouse’s family has announced that a hologram of the late singer is to go on tour in 2019 and that a biopic of her life is to be made.

Mitch Winehouse, Amy’s father, confirmed the biopic deal with Monumental Pictures on Monday. He will be executive producer, with Lily Allen’s mother Alison Owen to co-produce it with Debra Hayward. Owen produced ‘Saving Mr Banks,’ while Hayward worked with documentary maker Asif Kapadia on ‘Senna’ in 2010.

Kapadia’s 2015 documentary about Winehouse was given full approval by the Winehouse family, only for Mitch to deride it on its release. The Guardian’s film critic Pete Bradshaw said it showed Mitch walking out on the family when Amy was a child, only to “return to become a strange sort of intrusive, ineffective and almost parasitic Svengali to her career”.

Amy, whose battles with drink and drugs were well-known, died from alcohol poisoning at her home in Camden in 2011, shortly after she had appeared on-stage in Belgrade so inebriated that she didn’t know where she was.

The biopic, which promises “previously unseen footage,” will be aired before a company called Base Hologram launches a “tour” of the singer, seen through digital projection, with remastered arrangements of her songs, backed by a live band, singers and what the company called “theatrical stagecraft”.

The money – from both the hologram tour and the biopic – will go to The Amy Winehouse Foundation, which Mitch co-founded. The latest accounts showed it raised £450,000 from merchandising, commissions, royalties, gala dinners and “performances from Mitch Winehouse” in the last year. It paid out more than £500,000 in salaries.