Dreamchild

For the album by Toyah Willcox, see Dreamchild (album).

Dreamchild
Theatrical release poster
Directed byGavin Millar
Written byDennis Potter
Produced byRick McCallum
Kenith Trodd
StarringCoral Browne
Ian Holm
Peter Gallagher
Nicola Cowper
Amelia Shankley
CinematographyBilly Williams
Edited byAngus Newton
Music byStanley Myers
Production
company
Release date
  • 4 October 1985 (1985-10-04)
[1]
Running time
94 minutes[1]
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Budget£4 million[2] or $3.8 million[3] or £2.9 million[4]

Dreamchild is a 1985 British drama film written by Dennis Potter, directed by Gavin Millar, and produced by Rick McCallum and Kenith Trodd.[5] 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.

  1. ^ a b "Box Office Mojo – Dreamchild". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 13 April 2012.
  2. ^ Alexander Walker, Icons in the Fire: The Rise and Fall of Practically Everyone in the British Film Industry 1984–2000, Orion Books, 2005 p35
  3. ^ Harmetz, Aljean (24 January 1986). "At the Movies". The New York Times.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference potter was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Potter and Verity Lambert are credited as executive producers in the opening titles