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

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.

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.

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.

She recalls the boating party through this new perspective; she realizes that Dodgson was jealous when she met the boy whom she would one day marry, and that she enjoyed toying with his affections, deliberately baiting him to provoke his nervous stutter.

Potter had previously adapted the story for television in 1965 for the BBC's Wednesday Play anthology series, under the title Alice.

[6] Potter expanded the story and added to his script, basing Dreamchild on a real incident where Alice went to New York to collect an honorary degree.

He decided to do it as a feature, but after unhappy experiences writing Pennies from Heaven and Gorky Park he did it through his own company and also worked as executive producer.

[citation needed] The Chinese costume sequence in the film depicting Dodgson taking Alice's portrait at Oxford is based on actual photographs he took of her and her sisters.

"I Only Have Eyes for You" is sung at a tea dance at the Waldorf Astoria and Mrs. Hargreaves has a scene at a radio station that includes a crooner's rendition of "Confessin'".

According to director Gavin Millar, the film's producer, Verity Lambert, "never wanted the dean, Alice's father, to be [played by] Nigel Hawthorne," actively but unsuccessfully opposing him cast in the role.

"The bright, poised, subtly flirty Alice at ten [is] played by Amelia Shankley, whose conversations with her sisters have an angelic precision.

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.

When writing in 1986 about his experience at the world premiere in Oxford, Wakeling found the film "visually stunning... well made technically, with actors of outstanding ability".