Synopsis for
An Awfully Big Adventure (1995) More at IMDbPro »

During the film's prologue, a woman leaves her baby in a basement surrounded by candles. Before departing from the house, she quickly drops a string of pearls on the child's pillow, twined around a single red rose.

Years later, 16-year-old Stella Bradshaw lives in a working class household with her Aunt Lily and Uncle Vernon in Liverpool. Lacking an adult in her life that she feels close to, she frequently goes into phone booths to speak to her mother, who never appears in the film. Stella has no interest in schoolwork and Uncle Vernon, who sees a theatrical career as being her only alternative to working behind the counter at Woolworth's, signs her up for drama 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, the sleazy, eccentric director of the troupe.

The impressionable Stella develops a crush on the worldly, self-absorbed Potter, whose homosexuality completely eludes her. Potter turns out to be a cruel, apathetic man who treats Stella and everyone else around him with scorn and condescension and has a long history of seducing and exploiting young men. His latest dalliance is with Geoffrey, 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 troupe, among them P.L. O'Hara, a brilliant actor who returns to the company 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 embarks on an affair with Stella, to whom he feels an inexplicably deep emotional connection. Stella, who is still set on winning Potter's favor, remains emotionally detached but takes advantage of O'Hara's affections, seeing it as an opportunity to gain sexual experience. Disturbed by Stella's pursuing of the abusive Potter, O'Hara visits her aunt and uncle, who fill him in on Stella's history. He soon finds out that Stella's long-missing mother was his lost love, whom he then knew by the nickname Stella Maris, making Stella -- who he has been sleeping with -- his child, a daughter rather than the son he had imagined.

Keeping his discovery to himself, O'Hara hops on his motorcycle and drives out to the sea. Distracted, he slips on the wet gangplank, hits his head and is pitched into the water.

Potter takes on the role of Captain Hook for the last performance. During the scene in the play where Tinkerbell is ill and Peter says that she come become well again if children believed in fairies, Stella (who is in the wings operating Tinkerbell's light with a mirror and flashlight) overhears news of O'Hara's death. When Peter tells the audience to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, Stella drops the mirror, causing Tinkerbell's light to die out.

Stella is later seen hastening to the phone booth to confide her woes over the phone to "her mother" -- as has been her habit throughout the film. We are suddenly reminded that the 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 daughter's confidences.