Book Scarlett Johansson Tried To Ban Will Be Published In The UK

A book that Scarlett Johansson tried to have banned is to be published in the UK next month.

‘La Première Chose Qu’on Regarde’ (translated as 'The First Thing You See’) is written by award-winning novelist Grégoire Delacourt, and tells the story of a mechanic called Arthur Dreyfuss who is visited one night by a woman he believes to be Johansson.

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It later emerges that she isn’t Johansson, but a lookalike, upon which the pair begin a relationship.

Despite selling 140,000 in France, Johansson sued Delacourt last year, in an attempt to stop it being translated and sold in other countries, as well as preventing it ever being made into a movie.

She claimed that the book was a 'violation and fraudulent and illegal exploitation of her name, her reputation and her image’, and made 'defamatory claims about her private life’.

The judge in the case did rule that the book was defamatory, but threw out her request for the book not to be translated or filmed.

Johansson was given £1,600 in damages, not the €50,000 she had initially sought, and fictional mentions of affairs the actress had had were removed.

At the time of the court action, a spokesperson for the book’s publisher JC Lattés said: “It is all the more surprising [as] the novel is not even about Scarlett Johansson. It is about Scarlet Johansson’s double.”

Delacourt has said that 'all that is in the book concerning this actress is true and well-meant’, and that the work was a ‘declaration of love’ for the star.

He added that he got the idea for the book after reading the results of a survey in France which said that half of girls aged between 15 and 25 were considering cosmetic surgery.

“So I asked myself, as an old advertiser, a young writer, and a father of a normal age, what we were doing to our children to stop them liking themselves as they were,” he told the Guardian.

“And I suspected that appearances (fashion, models, actors) had become a more important model than what is inside.

“So I imagined this encounter between one of the most beautiful girls in the world, and a boy who, like all boys, dreams of the most beautiful girl in the world. And when the surface cracks, we discover what is most important: real beauty is self-esteem.”

Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson will release the book in hardback and ebook on September 10.

Image credit: Yahoo/AFP/JC Lattes