Tom Hanks will make his Broadway debut in March playing the New York tabloid columnist Mike McAlary in the world premiere production of “Lucky Guy,” a bio-drama by Nora Ephron that she had been writing for years until her death in June, the producers of the play announced on Thursday.

Mr. Hanks, a two-time Oscar winner (“Forrest Gump,” “Philadelphia”) who made his professional theater debut as a servant in a Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” worked with Ephron on two movies she wrote and directed – “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” – and was in negotiations for “Lucky Guy” when she died.

Ephron, a former New York Post reporter who went on to become an acclaimed essayist and filmmaker, first developed “Lucky Guy” as a movie – she had three Academy Award screenwriting nominations – then decided to adapt the project for the stage, according to friends. Ephron’s previous experience on Broadway was with her play “Imaginary Friends,” about the writers Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, which opened during the 2002-03 season to mixed reviews and closed after three months.

McAlary was one of the most popular tabloid newspaper writers in New York City history when he died in 1998, from colon cancer at age 41. He covered crime and cops and the major police department corruption scandals of the 1980s and ’90s, most famously the Abner Louima brutality case, which won him the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. According to the Broadway producers’ statement announcing the show, the 13-actor “Lucky Guy” is about “the scandal- and graffiti-ridden New York of the 1980s, as told through the story of the charismatic and controversial tabloid columnist Mike McAlary.”

The director of “Lucky Guy” is George C. Wolfe, a Tony Award winner for “Angels in America” and “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk” and a Tony nominee for the 2011 Broadway revival of “The Normal Heart.”

The production will run at the Broadhurst Theater, which was to be the home of the new musical “Rebecca” before that show was scuttled last week due to financial problems. Preview performances will begin March 1 and opening night is set for April 1.

Tickets for the production will be on sale through May 19. Broadway plays with Hollywood stars tend to have brief runs because of the actors’ other commitments; a limited run can create high demand from audiences, allowing theater owners and producers to set more expensive prices for so-called premium tickets, an increasingly common practice on Broadway.

The producers of “Lucky Guy” are Colin Callender (a former president of HBO Films) and several veteran Broadway producers, including Roy Furman, Roger Berlind, Robert Cole and Frederick Zollo, Daryl Roth and Sonia Friedman.