im remembering a movie from my childhood similar to a little princess and the secret garden that also has a little orphan girl in victorian england (or right around then), but shes redheaded and has dark brown eyes. shes getting adopted by some sort of dark household or something and whoever is picking her up is talking about how ugly and pitiful she is. it was definitely british and i think the manor was on the moors.
it was definitely not anne of green gables, but that’s all i get when i try to look up any sort of description.
i remember it being slightly darker than a little princess and the secret garden, sort of like a mix of secret garden and wuthering heights. i remember it being a dark movie. i dont think she stayed a little girl for the entirety of the movie, i think she was older at some point in the movie. i believe it may have included romance, but i’m not too positive. all i truly remember is the scene where she is getting picked up and her big dark eyes and red hair
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thank you for any help you can provide
A version of Jane Eyre ?
There’s a movie called Evelyn which is about a dad losing his kids and trying to get them back, I think the girl was a redhead, she’s not being adopted but is in a care home that’s like religious school with nuns I think… otherwise your description also sounds a bit like the queens gambit but that is much more recent
Annie: A Royal Adventure?
Annie is obviously an American character, but this particular version is set in England.
There is a version of The Secret Garden from 1993 which is quite dark. Mary is an orphan, she’s getting picked up by the Housekeeper Mrs Minchin and it’s a cold and scary journey over the moors to Misselthwaite manor. So that fits your story. There’s also a Hallmark Hall of Fame version of The Secret Garden from 1987 where it has a scene at the end showing the characters Mary and Colin meeting in the garden after WWI >!where he was wounded but DICKON was killed for no reason at all except to tack on a !<romance which was not in the classic book.
But: in the book and movies Mary has brown hair. You can google Kate Maberly (1993 version) or Gennie Janes (1987) to see how they were styled in the films. But it was Anne of Green Gables that was the red haired orphan, and her jaunt was through beautiful St Edwards Island, not the cold dark moors. Could you have conflated two 1990’s films / TV? The classic Anne miniseries was from 1985 but it aired on PBS for years.
Was it Pollyanna?
Madeline maybe ?
I remember seeing a movie that sounds like this back in high school, early 00s.
I remember the main character having a reddish brown hair as a kid. The movie ended with her as an adult and going back to the estate where she’d been adopted to find the man is blind and divorced now. I believe she develops romantic feelings for him throughout the movie.
Unfortunately that’s all I really remember, does any of that sound familiar? Sadly can’t remember the name.
Ever After (1998) with Drew Barrymore?
Not quite red hair, but darker tones of verbal and physical abuse through the movie. The setting is a castle/manor in France, though the accents are kind of all over the place, including British.
Solving comment (by Travelgrrl): There is a version of The Secret Garden from 1993 which is quite dark. Mary is an orphan, she’s getting picked up by the Housekeeper Mrs Minchin and it’s a cold and scary journey over the moors to Misselthwaite manor. So that fits your story. There’s also a Hallmark Hall of Fame version of The Secret Garden from 1987 where it has a scene at the end showing the characters Mary and Colin meeting in the garden after WWI >!where he was wounded but DICKON was killed for no reason at all except to tack on a !<romance which was not in the classic book.
But: in the book and movies Mary has brown hair. You can google Kate Maberly (1993 version) or Gennie Janes (1987) to see how they were styled in the films. But it was Anne of Green Gables that was the red haired orphan, and her jaunt was through beautiful St Edwards Island, not the cold dark moors. Could you have conflated two 1990’s films / TV? The classic Anne miniseries was from 1985 but it aired on PBS for years.