OREANDA-NEWS. The creator of the series «Vikings» and «Tudors» — New Zealand director Michael Hurst will shoot a series about the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War, the Deadline portal reports.

Working on the film, he adapts the book by Anna Reid «Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944», which consists of the diaries of the participants of the blockade. According to Michael Hurst, the series will focus on female characters, since the diaries were mostly kept by the remaining women in the city. The production will be attended by the film company «Orangery Productions» of Svetlana and Alexey Kuzmichev.

Michael Hurst is a 63-year-old actor, director and screenwriter, best known for his role as Iolaus in the 1990s television series «The Amazing Wanderings of Hercules». Throughout the years of filming from 1995 to 1999, Hurst was one of the main characters in this series, and also appeared a couple of times in the same role in the series «Xena — the Warrior Queen». In 1995, Hurst directed two episodes of the series about Hercules, for which he won the New Zealand Film and Television Awards in 1997 and 1999. His first directorial debut in a feature film was the film «Jubilee», which was released in 2000.