Thompson to play author of Mary Poppins

British actress Emma Thompson is in talks to star in a new movie as the author who created magical nanny Mary Poppins, according to reports.

If you are looking for autobiographical facts, Mary Poppins is the story of my life

US actor Tom Hanks, 55, is in negotiations to play Walt Disney, who spent 14 years wooing P. L. Travers to sell the film rights to her story, trade title Variety reported.

Saving Mr Banks is the true story of the making of the 1964 film, which starred Dame Julie Andrews as the English nanny.

Travers, who was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia in 1899, but changed her name to Pamela Travers, was unhappy with the hit film, particularly the animated sequences.

She wrote the story of the magical nanny, which became an immediate success and spawned several sequels, in 1934, after sailing to England in 1924.

Travers, who died in London at the age of 96, ruled out follow-ups to the Mary Poppins film, disapproving of the way the studio had removed the darker aspects of her nanny character.

She later said that her creation had been “both a joy and a curse to me as a writer” and that she had “never written for children, for who knows where childhood ends and adulthood begins?”

The author, whose own family had fallen on hard times when she was a child, once said: “If you are looking for autobiographical facts, Mary Poppins is the story of my life”.

The movie will be directed by John Lee Hancock, who made The Blind Side, which won Sandra Bullock a best actress Oscar in 2010. Sense And Sensibility and Nanny McPhee star Ms Thompson, 52, has just finished filming Men In Black III and has been writing a remake of the musical My Fair Lady, which is set to star Carey Mulligan as Eliza Doolittle.

She won an Oscar for her leading role in 1992’s Howards End and a second Academy Award in 1996 for best adapted screenplay for Sense And Sensibility.

Mr Hanks, also a double Oscar winner, recently finished filming Cloud Atlas, based on the novel by British author David Mitchell and is due to start filming Captain Phillips in Malta. Robert B. Sherman, who composed, with his brother Richard, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and A Spoonful of Sugar from the Mary Poppins film, died earlier this year.