Benedict Cumberbatch 'in talks to play Alan Turing' the Enigma codebreaker

Benedict Cumberbatch who is currently playing Julian Assange in Wikileaks film The Fifth Estate looks set to bag another high profile real-life character.

The Sherlock actor is in talks to play Bletchley Park codebreaker and mathematician Alan Turing according to a report in Deadline.

Graham Moore's screenplay The Imitation Game has been commissioned by Black Bear Pictures with Headhunters' Morten Tyldum signed up to direct.

Turing is widely hailed as responsible for cracking the Enigma Code which greatly helped British naval efforts during the Second World War. Also known for what is regarded as the first blue print for modern computing, Turing's heroic wartime activities were not revealed to his family or the world until after his death.

The State which Turing had fought to protect cruelly turned on him in 1952. He was found guilty of gross indecency for homosexual acts avoiding prison by agreeing to be chemically castrated. He took Stilboestrol, a pill containing female hormones, but was removed from his government work and felt himself to have been placed under observation. As the holder of State secrets, who was in 1950s attitudes a sexual deviant, he was a dangerous outcast.

He was found dead aged 41 on 7 June 1954 having apparently taken cyanide.

Turing's remarkable life and achievements, so numerous that the Science Museum currently has an entire exhibition dedicated to them, are only now being fully recognised and a petition to get his face put on a £10 note garnered 26,336 signatories last year.

The script for The Imitation Game was originally sold to Warner Bros with Leonardo DiCaprio intended for the main role. But the project was shelved and sold onto Black Bear when the actor got involved with The Devil In The White City for Warner.