Tom Hanks hopes to strike it Lucky on Broadway

Tom Hanks, Zooey Deschanel and Downton Abbey actor Dan Stevens are among the stars making their Broadway debuts in the forthcoming autum/winter season, which will also see the debut of a musical about Charlie Chaplin. Two-time Oscar winner Hanks will play the tabloid newspaper columnist Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy, a new play by Sleepless in Seattle writer Nora Ephron, according to the New York Post . Scheduled for a limited run at the Shubert Theatre from January 2013, the play charts McAlary's controversial career as a crime journalist, which included a high-profile libel suit and a Pulitzer prize, before he died of colon cancer aged 41. Hanks's last stage appearance was a one-off benefit reading of The Comedy of Errors in 2009, opposite his wife Rita Wilson, Kelsey Grammer and Christina Applegate. The performance was intended to raise funds for the Shakespeare festival in Los Angeles. He hasn't performed live in New York since 1979, when he played in an Off-Off Broadway production of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Mandrake , as a result of which he got his first agent. Meanwhile Deschanel, who was nominated for a Golden Globe last year for the sitcom New Girl, will play country-music singer Loretta Lynn in a musical version of the 1980 biopic film Coal Miner's Daughter , the dates for which will be confirmed soon. The actor is also a singer-songwriter and picked up a Grammy nomination last year for her song So Long, as well as writing the New Girl theme. Stevens, in turn, will star opposite the Hollywood actor Jessica Chastain in The Heiress from October, directed by Moisés Kaufman. An adaption of Henry James's novel Washington Square, The Heiress was made into a film in 1949, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, and follows a wealthy New Yorker, who falls in love with a suitor, played by Stevens, of whom her father disapproves. By the time The Heiress opens, Chaplin should have been up and running for at least a month, having opened on 10 September at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, the current home to the Tony-nominated production of Death of a Salesman. Charlie Curtis's musical, with a book by Thomas Meehan, premiered under the name Limelight at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego two years ago, when it was named best musical at the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle awards. Its Broadway debut will be directed by Warren Carlyle, who helmed Hugh Jackman's record-breaking solo show last year. Casting has not yet been announced.