Has Madonna's Wallis Simpson obsession gone too far?

A few weeks ago, actress Margo Stilley and Madonna had a heated argument. The row started with a discussion over how Stilley – best known for her sexually explicit performance in Michael Winterbottom's controversial 2004 film

Stilley is the latest in a long line to quit the production – those no longer associated with the film include the actors Ewan McGregor and Vera Farmiga (due to play Edward and Wallis), producer David Parfitt (who won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love) and the distinguished casting director Nina Gold. By her own admission, Madonna is not easy to work with: 'To me, the whole process of being a brushstroke in someone else's painting is a little difficult,'she has said. 'I'm used to being in charge of everything.'

It's not hard to understand why Madonna finds herself drawn to Wallis Simpson, the ambitious, American-born divorcée who re-invented herself as an international fashion and style icon and became one of the most famous and controversial women in the world. 'I've found that if you bring up King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at a dinner party or a social gathering, it's like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the room,'says Madonna, who co-wrote the script with Alek Keshishian, the music video turned film director who worked with her on In Bed With Madonna. 'Everyone erupts into an argument about who they were. I mean, they were very controversial – and continue to be. So, of course, I'm very attracted to that.'

W.E. tells the story of a young woman, Wally Winthrop (played by the Australian actress Abbie Cornish, who was Fanny Brawne in the Keats biopic Bright Star), who becomes fascinated with the auction of the Duchess of Windsor's possessions, while working at Sotheby's in New York, in 1998. Trapped in a dull marriage to a psychiatrist (Richard Coyle), she falls in love with Evgeni (Oscar Isaac), a Russian security guard with a mysterious past, and gradually immerses herself in what she believes was one of the 20th century's greatest love stories – that of Mrs Simpson and Edward, the king who gave up his throne to marry the woman he loved. In the film, the couple are played by James D'Arcy (Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Master and Commander) and Andrea Riseborough (best known for her role as the young Mrs Thatcher in the TV drama Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley), while Natalie Dormer (The Tudors) has been cast as the Queen Mother, James Fox as George V and his son Laurence Fox as Bertie, Edward's younger brother. 'Edward gave up the most powerful position in the world for this woman,'says Madonna. 'The fact that he abdicated his throne left many people devastated, and of course they had to demonise Wallis.'

The film began shooting this month in London, and Madonna has moved back to England for the duration of the shoot. Filming will continue in Paris and the South of France, although Buckingham Palace refused a request for use as a location. Indicating a rather haphazard start, some roles have remained uncast until the last moment. What are in place, however, are the fashion and jewellery houses that will be collab-orating with the film. Galliano and Issa will be providing clothes, Cartier the jewels, and Stephen Jones the hats. On set the atmosphere is now said to be good: Andrea Riseborough has plunged herself into the part, losing weight for the role and dyeing her hair raven black; Madonna is, apparently, very good with all the younger people on set and has made sure to learn everybody's name. No one will deny that she is a control freak, but as one industry insider pointed out: 'What film director isn't a control freak?'

As such, Madonna sees a mirror image of herself when she looks at Wallis Simpson. In both there is a desperate need to control every aspect of their environment – often to the point where it becomes maddening – and an obsession with diet and body image. It was, after all, the Duchess who coined the phrase 'You can never be too rich or too thin', a dictum that serves to describe them both. 'The Duchess of Windsor and Madonna share a love of money as well as a number of insecurities,'says biographer Anne Sebba, whose book That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor will be published next year. 'Of course, Madonna has been able to earn her own money, while Wallis had to marry in order to get it.'

As girls, Madonna and the Duchess felt alone and alienated, partly because they both lost a parent early in life. Wallis's father died from tuberculosis when she was a few months old, while Madonna was five when her 30-year-old mother died from breast cancer. 'There was so much left unsaid, so many untangled and unresolved emotions, of remorse, guilt, loss, anger, confusion,'Madonna has said.

For her part, the Duchess, who was born Bessie Wallis Warfield in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania in 1896, had a number of phobias, including a fear of being left alone in the dark, something she could trace back to her childhood. 'For the first time I came to know loneliness as loneliness can only be known in the excruciatingly sensitive perceptions of childhood,'she said. 'There is no way, in my opinion, of explaining how a child is able to sense the unhappiness and despair of grown-ups; but the phenomenon occurs – I experienced it.'

In an effort to keep her fears at bay – the dark chaos that raged inside her – Wallis learned to control the minutiae of her life. She had to have her sheets changed and ironed twice a day. It was said she could only handle money that had come straight from a bank – if the notes had been used, they, too, had to be ironed. At her dinner parties, she insisted that the food – whether it be lettuce leaves or pieces of fish – be trimmed to exactly the same size. 'I am almost too fussy,'she said. 'My friends are almost afraid to sit down for fear of disarranging the cushions.'

Laura Charteris, the Duchess of Marlborough, recalled Wallis as being constantly on the move, always jumping up to rearrange an ornament or plump up a cushion on the sofa. One observer wrote about her, in 1944: 'The Duchess gives the impression of terrific neatness, not a hair out of place, not a line awry. Her nose never shines. Her slip never shows. She looks like a period room done by a furniture house, a room in which nobody lives comfortably.'Friends said that the Duchess was particularly controlling of her lover. While at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in May 1935, two years before their marriage, Wallis was overheard snapping at Edward, 'Hurry off now, you'll be late for the London County Council Ball. And take that cigar out of your breast pocket – it doesn't look very pretty'. The politician and diarist Sir Henry 'Chips'Channon noted, after attending one of the couple's lunch parties, that Wallis 'already had the air of a personage who walks into a room as though she almost expected to be curtsied to. She has complete power over the Prince of Wales.'