JOHANNESBURG, March 19 (Xinhua) -- Just earning her fame for starring the Oscar-winning Tsotsi, South African actress Terry Pheto now eyes an international project in which she would play Nelson Mandela's daughter, a South African newspaper said on Sunday.

    Pheto is in talks to portray Zinzi, daughter of Mandela and hisformer wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, in the big-budget film, Goodbye Bafana (Boy), Sunday Times reported.

    The film is based on a memoir by Mandela's prison guard, James Gregory, which chronicled the initially racist warden's close relationship with the Nobel Peace Prize winner and the first blackpresident of South Africa.

    Gregory was Mandela's warder for 20 years - from Robben Island to Pollsmoor in Cape Town and then Victor Verster Prison in Paarl,from where he was released in 1990.

    Gregory, a typical white Afrikaner who regarded blacks as sub-human, grew up on a farm in the Transkei where he learned to speakXhosa at an early age. This made him an ideal choice to become thewarder in charge of Mandela and his anti-apartheid comrades because Gregory could spy on them without them knowing it.

    But the ploy backfired, according to the film's website. Through Mandela's influence, Gregory's allegiance gradually shifted from racism to outright support of Mandela in his quest for a democratically free South Africa.

    "Goodbye Bafana tracks the unlikely but profound relationship that develops between these two men," said the website.

    Dennis Haysbert (President David Palmer in hit TV series "24") will feature as Mandela, with Joseph Fiennes (William Shakespeare in Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love) as Gregory and Diane Kruger (Helen of Troy in Troy) as his wife, Gloria.

    Preproduction on the 155-million-rand (25 million US dollars) movie, by the award-winning Danish director Bille August, has begun in Cape Town.

    Pheto, 24, told Sunday Times that she was inspired by Mandela during a meeting with Mandela on Thursday as part of the Tsotsi team's tour around the country.

    Tsotsi, about a Johannesburg township thug's journey of self redemption, won the Oscar for the best foreign language film earlier this month in Los Angeles. Enditem