Balian depicted him as a fabulist, a liar who made up extravagant stories about being a famous film director, the heir to a South African fortune and a descendant of British royalty.
And "Dreamchild" (1985), with Ian Holm as Lewis Carroll and Coral Browne as an aged Alice Liddell, jumps from reality to memory to fantasy and back again as it charts the odd and unsettling, yet somehow life-affirming, relationship between a repressed but brilliant fabulist and his juvenile muse.