Tom Hanks is set to play Walt Disney in a film about the making of the children's classic Mary Poppins, reports Deadline. He looks likely to star opposite Emma Thompson as Australian author PL Travers, who held out for more than 14 years before finally agreeing to allow Hollywood to adapt her book.

Saving Mr Banks, which has landed fittingly at studio Disney, is the latest example of the film industry delving into its own past in order to produce new entertainment. Last year's Oscar-nominated My Week With Marilyn centred on the troubled 1957 production of Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier comedy The Prince and the Showgirl, while Anthony Hopkins and Scarlett Johansson are to star in the upcoming Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho about the director's struggle to bypass the studios and fund the iconic low-budget, black-and-white 1960 horror film from his own pocket.

The Blind Side's John Lee Hancock will take the director's chair on Saving Mr Banks, working from a screenplay by Kelly Marcel, which made last year's Black List of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood. It tells the story of Travers' deep discomfort over the film version of what was a highly personal book. Mary Poppins, published in 1934, was inspired by hardships in the writer's own life, as well as her relationship with her father. Travers was not impressed by the final 1964 film, being particularly disappointed with the animated sequences, and subsequently refused to sell any of her other stories to Disney. There are eight novels in total about the magical English nanny who turns up at the Banks household in London to care for the childen after being blown in on the east wind.

Disney's musical starred an Oscar-winning Julie Andrews in her Hollywood debut as Poppins and is best known for songs such as A Spoonful of Sugar and Chim Chim Cher-ee (which won the 1965 best song Academy Award), as well as American actor Dick Van Dyke's questionable cockney accent in the role of jack-of-all-trades Bert.