Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, Finding Neverland
The character of Peter Pan first appeared in James M. Barrie's 1902 novel The Little White Bird.
The stage play Peter Pan was first presented at the Duke of York Theatre in London in December 1904. Thirty-seven-year-old Nina Boucicault played Peter and Gerald du Maurier, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies' brother, played Captain Hook. (Sylvia's niece was Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel.)
Fearing that the sophisticated first-night audience would be unresponsive, J.M. Barrie told the orchestra to put down their instruments and clap their hands at the moment where Peter turns to the audience and says, "If you believe in fairies, wave your handkerchiefs and clap your hands." As the story goes, when Nina Boucicault begged for the life of Tinkerbell, the audience response was so overwhelming the actress burst into tears.
Also worth mentioning is that Arthur Lupino, the original dog Nana in the stage play, was the great-uncle of future Warner Bros. star Ida Lupino (High Sierra, The Hard Way).
Now, contrary to what takes place in Finding Neverland, Arthur Llewelyn Davies, Sylvia's husband, was very much alive when J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp in the movie) entered the lives of the Llewelyn Davies family. Also, there were actually five Llewelyn Davies children; Nicholas (Nico) Llewelyn Davies is missing from Finding Neverland. His daughter, Laura Duguid, has a bit part in the film, as the woman who asks the young Peter (Freddie Highmore) if he is Peter Pan.
"There never was a simpler and happier family until the coming of Peter Pan," Barrie wrote in "Peter and Wendy" (later retitled Peter Pan). In his book JM Barrie and the Lost Boys, author Andrew Birkin suggests that Barrie had in mind his own entrance into the lives of the Llewelyn Davieses. Arthur Llewelyn Davies died in 1907 of cancer of the jaw. Sylvia (Kate Winslet in Finding Neverland) died three years later of lung cancer.
According to many, J.M. Barrie (right) — who looked nothing like Johnny Depp — had more than a fatherly interest in the Llewelyn Davies boys. Yet, Birkin, who read much of Barrie's correspondence and who spoke with Nico Llewelyn Davies, believes that Barrie was "essentially asexual, clearly impotent. He was a lover of children, yes, but not sexually." Yet, much remains unknown. The more than 2,000 letters between Barrie and his favorite Llewelyn Davies boy, Michael, were burned by Peter in 1952.
George, the oldest Llewelyn Davies boy, died in Flanders in 1915, one of the millions of World War I victims.
Michael, Barrie's favorite and the model for the Peter Pan statue in London's Kensington Gardens, drowned with a male friend while at Oxford in May 1921. He couldn't swim, and the deaths were believed to have been the result of a suicide pact. The two bodies, when recovered, were found clinging together. Although Peter Pan was an amalgam of all the Llewelyn Davies brothers, Michael is supposed to have been the closest to Barrie's vision of the boy who would never grow old.
Peter, who hated to have his name associated with "that terrible masterpiece," became a publisher. In 1960, at the age of 63, he committed suicide by throwing himself under a train at London's Sloane Square station. Two newspaper headlines read: "Peter Pan's Death Leap" and "The Boy Who Never Grew Up Is Dead."
"Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life," theater impresario Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman in Finding Neverland) purportedly said before going down with the ocean liner Lusitania, which had been torpedoed off the Irish coast by a German U-Boat in 1915. Spoken by Peter Pan, the actual line in Barrie's play at the end of Act III is "To die would be an awfully big adventure."
J.M. Barrie died of pneumonia in 1937. He was 77.
Main sources: A. S. Byatt's "A child in time" in The Guardian and Anthony Lane's "Lost Boys" in The New Yorker.