Tony Award winner Brian Dennehy will make his big-screen directing debut with the fact-based drama Redemption, according to published reports. He will also co-write the screenplay with Joe Seldner.

Redemption centers on Joyce Ann Brown, who spent more than nine years in prison for a 1980 fur store robbery and murder in Dallas that she didn't commit, and Jim McCloskey, a crusader for the wrongly convicted, who fought for her release.

Dennehy won Tony Awards for Long Day's Journey Into Night and Death of a Salesman, and most recently starred on Broadway in Desire Under the Elms. He will appear in a double bill of Eugene O'Neill's Hughie and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Goodman Theatre later this year, which is scheduled to transfer to Broadway in April of next year.