The true story of Alice in Wonderland.

Irreverent British writer Dennis Potter speaks aloud what many literary historians have only postulated in whispers in Dreamchild. The film is set in 1932, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alice in Wonderland creator Lewis Carroll. The guest of honor at the New York-based celebration is 80-year-old Alice Liddell (Coral Browne), who as a child inspired Carroll's whimsical novels. Amidst the cajoling of both devoted fans and fast-buck hustlers, the grim-faced Alice tries to remain calm and dignified. What none of the idolaters suspect is that Alice harbors a long-suppressed secret concerning her "very special" relationship with Carroll -- a secret revealed in an extremely tasteful fashion during a flashback sequence, featuring Amelia Shankley as young Alice and Ian Holm as Charles Dodgson, the virginal, child-obsessed clergyman whom the world knew as Lewis Carroll. The darkness of Dennis Potter's vision is lightened by Muppeteer Jim Henson's marvelous three-dimensional renditions of the Wonderland and Looking Glass characters.

Dreamchild is a 1985 British drama film written by Dennis Potter, directed by Gavin Millar and produced by Rick McCallum and Kenith Trodd.[3] It stars Coral Browne, Ian Holm, Peter Gallagher, Nicola Cowper and Amelia Shankley and is a fictionalised account of Alice Liddell, the child who inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The story is told from the point of view of the 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 Lewis 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.


The film was reviewed favourably by the critic Pauline Kael who praised the performances. "Nothing I've seen Coral Browne do onscreen had prepared me for this performance. In the past she seemed too bullying a presence; she was too stiffly theatrical for the camera and her voice was a blaster. Here, as Mrs. Hargreaves, she has the capacity for wonder of the Alice of the stories, and when she's overtaken by frailty her voice is querulous and fading." "The bright, poised, subtly flirty Alice at ten [is] played by Amelia Shankley, whose conversations with her sisters have an angelic precision. The sound of these imperious little-princess voices blended in idle chitchat is plangent, evocative. It makes you happy and makes you respond to the happiness of the Reverend Mr. Dodgson as he loiters outside the little girls' windows, eavesdropping." "Ian Holm, who plays Dodgson, has to achieve almost all his effects passively, by registering the man's acute and agonizing self-consciousness and his furtive reactions to what goes on around him; it's all there in Holm's performance."[4]

Andrew Sarris's review in The Village Voice was titled "the Film That Got Away."[5] Sarris wrote that the film "gets infinitely better as it goes along, rising inexorably towards a rich epiphany" and resisting "facile irony". He wrote, "what makes the film so rousing and inspiring is its invocation of love and art as redemptive forces pitted against the dark spirits."[5]

In an article published many years later, in 2014, in the film magazine Sight & Sound, Philip Horne expanded on the relative obscurity of Dreamchild and wrote that it "remains a film worth fighting fo

Release Date: October 4, 1985

Distrib: Universal


Boxoffice: $1,215,923 2014: $2,791,500