Q:Build a movie plot around this: Who plays Captain Hook in the Christmas production of Peter Pan? P.L. O'Hara
A:
In the film's prologue, 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 child's pillow, twined around a single rose.Years later, 16-year-old Stella Bradshaw (Georgina Cates) lives in a working class household with her Uncle Vernon (Alun Armstrong) and Aunt Lily (Rita Tushingham) in Liverpool. Lacking an adult in her life that she feels close to, she frequently goes into phone booths to speak with her mother, who never appears in the film. Stella has no interest in schoolwork and 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 the strings to get her involved at a regional playhouse. After an unsuccessful audition, Stella gets a job gofering for Meredith Potter (Hugh Grant), the troupe's sleazy, eccentric director.The impressionable Stella develops a crush on the worldly, self-absorbed Potter, whose homosexuality completely eludes her. Potter reveals himself to be a cruel, apathetic man who treats Stella and everyone else around him with scorn and condescension and has a long history of exploiting young men. His latest dalliance is with Geoffrey (Alan Cox), another teenage apprentice. Stella is quickly caught up in the backstage intrigue and also becomes the object of passes from several men surrounding the theatre company, among them P.L. O'Hara (Alan Rickman), a brilliant actor who has returned to the troupe for a stint playing Captain Hook in its Christmas production of Peter Pan. In keeping with theatrical tradition, O'Hara also doubles in the role of Mr. Darling.O'Hara 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 (who, he believes, bore him a son he never knew), O'Hara...