RICHARD GERE - GERE TO FLY ALONGSIDE SWANK IN AMELIA EARHART BIOPIC

Richard Gere has joined the cast of Amelia, a biopic of the legendary aviator set to begin shooting this month.

Gere will star alongside Hilary Swank - in the title role - in the Mira Nair film, which will tell of the tumultuous relationship between the pioneering Earhart and her publicist George Putnam (Gere).

Oscar-winner Swank signed for the project last year while Avalon Pictures took advantage of the postponement of Shantaram to contract Mira Nair to direct.

Swank will play the pilot as her flight to fame began, when Putnam was engaged by socialite Amy Guest in 1927 to set up a non-stop flight across the Atlantic.

When Guest realised she was not capable of completing the journey herself, Putnam recruited Earhart, who had set the world altitude record for a female pilot in 1922.

Though she later admitted that co-pilot Wilmer Schultz did most of the flying on the trip from Trepassey Harbour, Newfoundland to Burry Port in Wales, the flight propelled Earhart to worldwide fame.

She disappeared in 1937 over the central Pacific Ocean while attempting to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe.

According to Variety, Pretty Woman star Gere has also signed up for upcoming cop drama Brooklyn's Finest, directed by Training Day helmer Antoine Fuqua and also starring Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke.

The Millennium Films project tells of three cops in the New York borough who find themselves in the same deadly quandary, having taken radically different career paths.