Fact1: 16-year-old Stella Bradshaw lives in working class household with Uncle Vernon Years later, Fact2: phone booths to speak with mother never appears in film, Fact3: uncle signs her up for speech lessons, Fact4: Stella After gets job gofering for Meredith Potter troupe 's sleazy eccentric director and Bunny unsuccessful audition, Fact5: Meredith has long history of exploiting young men
Output: A hotelier ushers a child into a bomb shelter during the Liverpool Blitz. We see a brief flashback to a woman leaving her baby in a basement surrounded by flickering candles. Before departing from the house, she quickly drops a string of pearls on the childs pillow, twined around a single rose. Years later, 16yearold Stella Bradshaw lives in a working class household with her Uncle Vernon, and Aunt Lily in Liverpool. Lacking an adult in her life to whom she feels close, she frequently goes into phone booths to speak with her mother, who never appears in the film. Her uncle, who sees a theatrical career as being her only alternative to working behind the counter at Woolworths, signs her up for speech lessons and pulls strings to get her involved at a local repertory theatre. After an unsuccessful audition, Stella gets a job gofering for Meredith Potter, the troupes sleazy, eccentric director, and Bunny, his faithful stage manager. The impressionable Stella develops a crush on the worldly, selfabsorbed Meredith whose homosexuality completely eludes her. Amused, he gives her the small role of Ptolemy the boyking in Caesar and Cleopatra but ignores her otherwise. Meredith reveals himself to be an amoral, apathetic man who treats Stella and everyone else around him with scorn and condescension. He reserves his greatest cruelty for Dawn Allenby, a desperate older actress whom he callously dismisses from the company; she later attempts suicide. Meredith also has a long history of exploiting young men. Stella is quickly caught up in the backstage intrigue and also becomes an object of sexual advances from men in the theatre company, including P. L. OHara Alan Rickman, a brilliant actor who has returned to the troupe in a stint playing Captain Hook for its Christmas production of Peter Pan. In keeping with theatrical tradition, P.L. also doubles as Mr. Darling. P.L. carries himself with grace and charisma, but privately is as troubled and disillusioned as the other members of the cast. Haunted by his wartime experiences and a lost love, he believes, she bore him a son he never knew. P.L. embarks on an affair with Stella, to whom he feels an inexplicably deep emotional connection. Stella, who is still determined to win over Meredith remains emotionally detached, but takes advantage of P.L. affections, seeing an opportunity to gain sexual experience. The last straw for Stella is during a cast outing when Geoffrey, a fellow teenage stagehand whom Potter has been sexually toying with, bursts out and headbutts him in the nose. The cast rushes to comfort Geoffrey, but Stella exclaims that he ought to be sacked. P.L. explains to her that Meredith has spent his life harming people like Geoffrey and causing pain to people like Bunny who really love him: believe it or not, it doesnt much matter him or her, old or young to Meredith. What he wants is hearts. Concerned, P.L. visits her aunt and uncle, who disclose Stellas history. He finds out that Stellas longmissing mother was his lost love, whom he then knew by the nickname Stella Maris, making Stella—whom hes been sleeping with—his child, a daughter rather than the son he had imagined. Keeping his discovery to himself, P.L. gets on his motorcycle and drives back out to the seaport. He distractedly slips on the wet gangplank, hits his head, and is pitched into the water. Before he drowns, he sees the woman from earlier flashbacks, clutching the infant. Stella is later seen hastening to the phone booth to confide her woes over the phone to her mother—Absent Stella Maris had years ago won a nationwide contest to be the voice of the speaking clock. It is her recorded voice that provides the only response to her daughters confidences.