A Hollywood producer has acquired the rights to two books about a distinguished foreign correspondent of The Times, a war hero who was imprisoned in Colditz.

Michael Burn, 95, who filed a dispatch to the paper as soon as the Allies liberated him and his fellow PoWs, was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. He has given his blessing to two separate films inspired by his life story.

One of them will focus on his war years when he served as a captain of the commandos in the heroic and bloody raid on the docks of St Nazaire in western France in March 1942. Despite being wounded – and after every man in his boat was killed – he helped other men to safety and fought his way to a rendezvous point, before being captured and eventually sent to Colditz. The other film will focus more heavily on St Nazaire itself.

News of the films came yesterday as Mr Burn’s fellow commando veterans gathered in France to commemorate the anniversary of the raid and the men who lost their lives.

Speaking to The Times yesterday, Mr Burn said of the films: “I hoped this would happen. I am very happy.”

The films will be based on his autobiography, Turned Towards the Sun, published in 2003, and James Dorrian’s Storming St Nazaire.

Their producer, Robert Ozn, whose films include I Witness starring Jeff Daniels and James Spader, is planning a cross between Saving Private Ryan, The Dirty Dozenand Brideshead Revisited. He said: “Michael Burn and the troops who fought at St Nazaire represent all that Americans admire about the British warrior – impossibly brave men who transcended class distinctions with a deep compassion and humanity for those less fortunate.”

Casting has yet to begin but Jude Law heads his list to play a man who was devastatingly handsome – to both men and women. Although Mr Burn later married, Guy Burgess was among his lovers long before he was unmasked as a Soviet spy and traitor. Mr Burn, who was to become a fervent Marxist, was born into privilege and wealth. He was the son of Sir Clive Burn, secretary and solicitor to the Duchy of Cornwall, and educated at Winchester and Oxford.

He began his career as a journalist on the Gloucester Citizen, which sent him on a six-week assignment to report on Hitler’s Germany. There, through his friend Unity Mitford – the English aristocrat so enamoured with Hitler that she shot herself when her homeland declared war on the Third Reich in 1939 – he met the Führer and was invited to a Nazi party rally at Nuremberg.

Yesterday, he said: “I am ashamed I was taken in for a short time by National Socialism. What made me sympathise was that there were the two million unemployed in England. I had seen that in the coalfields and it sickened me. I thought that anyone who cures that was a good person. I didn’t realise the rest, but I was soon disillusioned about there being anything good about National Socialism.”

He joined The Times in 1936, becoming a protégé of Geoffrey Dawson, the Editor, initially a champion of appeasement. Mr Burn recalled: “He said to me, ‘We’re thinking of sending you to be trained as our Washington correspondent.’ I said, ‘What about the war?’ It was July 1939 then. He said, ‘My dear boy, the danger of war is immeasurably removed.’ That was two months before. It was wishful thinking.

“So many were taken in. My father, who had been in the First World War, wanted peace and couldn’t bear it.”

At Colditz, Mr Burn used his skills as a journalist to help to operate the secret radio, writing down dispatches in shorthand that he then relayed to the other PoWs.

After the war, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Vienna, Yugoslavia and Hungary. The History of The Times, 1939-66, paid tribute to his reports as “an exercise in honesty”.

Mr Ozn said that The Times will have a starring role on screen as it was “so much part of his life”.

Challenge of Colditz

— Colditz was a sonderlager – a special camp for difficult prisoners and inveterate escapers

— Despite tight security for five years, 316 men made daring escape attempts. Prisoners tried to get away through tunnels, in disguise or by jumping out of windows and over the wire: 32 of them were successful

Source: Imperial War Museum

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