PRESS UPDATE : THE GUARDIAN .. DECEMBER 10TH 2013..

From Lethal Weapon to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the buddy movie has long been dominated by men, but thanks to Joan Collins and Pauline Collins, all that is set to change.

The British actors will star in The Time of Their Lives, a road movie in which Joan plays a former Hollywood star who escapes her London retirement home and travels to France for her ex-husband's funeral. Pauline plays a housewife with a failing marriage who joins the trip, and the pair become romantically embroiled with a reclusive Frenchman played by Franco Nero.

"I was very excited by the script, which was sent to me about one month ago," Collins told Screen Daily. "There are very few roles today for women aged over 45, let alone over 65. The fact that it's a buddy movie along the lines of Thelma and Louise, with a hint of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, really interested me.

"People are sick to death of watching shoot 'em ups, blood and gore and explosions - those films for the 12-30 year-old market. It's time producers realised that people also want to see stories about mature adults, not only teenagers."

The film will be directed by Roger Goldby, who has blended TV work like Call The Midwife with features like The Waiting Room, starring Anne Marie-Duff and Ralf Little. He said that it will be "an uplifting, truthful comedy, a film about the transformative power of female friendship... One of my favourite films, Thelma and Louise, has been a touchstone throughout."

Its executive producer meanwhile is frequent Andrew Lloyd Webbercollaborator Tim Rice, who will also oversee the soundtrack – he said it would be filled with "wonderful French pop hits from the 60s, by artistes such as Johnny Hallyday, Sylvie Vartan, Jacques Dutronc and Francoise Hardy."

Pauline Collins, who became famous for her role in Shirley Valentine, recently starred in Dustin Hoffman's Quartet, which along with Le Week-end, The King's Speech and the aforementioned Marigold Hotel (plus its forthcoming sequel) is part of a recent wave of films courting older cinema-goers.

Joan Collins, has recently completed Molly Moon: The Incredible Hypnotist, a British adaptation of the Molly Moon children's fiction series. She plays the mother to the villain played by Dominic Monaghan, with Anne Marie-Duff, Celia Imrie, Lesley Manville and Omid Djalili also in the cast.