JK Rowling's life story is to be made into a TV film in the US, with an Australian actor in the lead role and Canada doubling as Scotland for the setting.

Poppy Montgomery – best known for playing FBI agent Samantha Spade in the US TV series Without a Trace, although she has also starred as Marilyn Monroe in an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's book on the singer – is slated to play the famous creator of the Harry Potter series in Strange Magic.

The film will relate the familiar story of the author's journey from single mother on benefits to bestselling children's author. Producers are said to have located an area in Canada that will pass for JK Rowling's home city of Edinburgh and will shoot it there. But unlike the blockbusters based on the Harry Potter novels, Strange Magic will be heading straight to the small screen.

Rowling has herself explored her difficult earlier years on film, revisiting the modest Edinburgh flat where Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was written, as part of an ITV documentary in 2007. Then, through tears, she remembered the "mess" her life was in at the time, and how she wrote the novel there and "turned my life around". That unguarded moment was a rare one for an author who protects her privacy with care.

Rowling has yet to make her views on the forthcoming biopic known. The US has already put its own distinctive take on the Harry Potter phenomenon, opening a theme park, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, in Florida.