Stevenson, already an established stage actress when she achieved wider prominence in the 90s with the movie Truly, Madly, Deeply and Channel 4 drama The Politician's Wife, will star alongside Hugh Bonneville in Hear the Silence.

The drama is Stevenson's first mainstream UK TV drama since 1999, when she played crown prosecutor Helen West in Trial By Fire, ITV's adaptation of the Frances Fyfield novel.

In the meantime Stevenson has been busy making movies, including Bend It Like Beckham and Mona Lisa Smile alongside Julia Roberts, and appearing on the stage, most recently in a New York revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.

Stevenson also appeared in Play, one of the short films in Channel 4's Samuel Beckett season broadcast two years ago.

Hear the Silence, in which Stevenson plays a mother who only finds out about the possible link between MMR and autism when her four-year-old son is diagnosed with the condition, marks a rare foray into original UK drama for Five.

The 90-minute drama is based on real life stories and features Bonneville as Dr Andrew Wakefield, the doctor whose research first linked the MMR vaccination with autism and provoked a backlash from the medical community.

"This is an entirely new direction for Five. This is such a compelling story I felt it was a drama we had to make," said the Five controller of drama, Corinne Hollingworth.

"The fact that we have been able to attract such well respected names as Juliet and Hugh is testimony to the power and immediacy of the script."

Hear the Silence has been written by Two Thousand Acres of Sky creator Tim Prager and is being made by independent production company Zenith North, which has credits including Byker Grove.

The drama is due to go into production in June, with Tim Fywell directing and Adrian Bate producing.

Five, with its relatively small programming budget of around £150m a year, has commissioned very little original UK drama - other than early evening soap Family Affairs - in its six-year history.

But the channel's director of programmes, Kevin Lygo, announced at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival last August that he wanted to do more original drama, even with Five's limited resources.