Dreamchild

Dreamchild is a 1985 British drama film written by Dennis Potter, directed by Gavin Millar, and produced by Rick McCallum and Kenith Trodd. The film, starring Coral Browne, Ian Holm, Peter Gallagher, Nicola Cowper and Amelia Shankley, is a fictionalised account of Alice Liddell, the child who inspired Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The story is told from the point of view of an elderly Alice (now the widowed Mrs. Hargreaves) as she travels to the United States from England to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University celebrating the centenary of Carroll's birth. It shares common themes with Potter's television play Alice (1965). The film evolves from the factual to the hallucinatory as Alice revisits her memories of the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Holm), in Victorian-era Oxford to her immediate present in Depression-era New York. Accompanied by a shy young orphan named Lucy (Cowper), old Alice must make her way through the modern world of tabloid journalism and commercial exploitation while attempting to come to peace with her conflicted childhood with the Oxford don. Plot The film begins on the ship bearing elderly widow Alice Hargreaves, who as Alice Liddell was Lewis Carroll's muse and the inspiration for his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and her caretaker Lucy. As they disembark, they are set upon by several journalists, all trying to get a story or quote from Alice about her relationship with Carroll, whom she knew as "Mr. Dodgson". Clearly bewildered by all the excitement, she is befriended by an ex-reporter, Jack Dolan, who helps her and Lucy through the legions of the press. Dolan quickly becomes her agent and finds endorsement opportunities for her. Throughout it all, a romance develops between Jack and Lucy. When left alone in their hotel room, Alice hallucinates that Mr. Dodgson (Ian Holm) is in their room, as well as the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, The Caterpillar, the Dormouse, the Mock Turtle, and the Gryphon. When she joins them for their tea party, they make fun of her for being so old and forgetful. She remembers also the lazy boating party of 4 July 1862, when Dodgson, then a mathematics professor at her father's school, had attempted to entertain her and her sisters by spinning the nonsense tale that grew to be Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.