"Alice In Wonderland, a two-part TV movie starring Natalie Gregory."

Film and TV productions across the years

TV SPECIAL PRODUCED BY IRWIN ALLEN IN 1985

(above) Steve Allen, who wrote all the songs,
chats with Red Buttons.

On-camera, Red Buttons had settled into a zany portrayal of the White Rabbit, which pleased Irwin Allen, who had encouraged the veterans to lay their own comic styles and eccentricities upon the fairy-tale characters. Jonathan Jonathan Winters

Winters invested Humpty Dumpty with such lunacy that one crewman said admiringly, "That's really demented, isn't it?" When Carol Channing asked whether Allen thought she should develop an English accent for her role as the White Queen, the producer wailed, "I don't want any accent. I brought Carol Channing to do Carol Channing…"
"The most amazing thing to me," said one actress, "was that with all these big stars and big reputations, nobody tried to do a star turn on anybody else. I've started thinking that there's something

to this 'You are what you wear.' Actors did things in these outfits that they'd never have otherwise done."
And so, freed from themselves, they delivered strangely enchanting performances: the Cheshire Cat, Telly Savalas, who had never sung before in a movie, doing it now in a beautifully operatic voice; the Red Queen, Ann Jillian, stifling the urge to cry while singing an emotional number to Natalie; the Mock Turtle, Ringo Starr, unabashedly doing a ditty that sounded as if it would have fit right aboard a Yellow Submarine. Perhaps some of the childlike wonder of it all had rubbed off from little Natalie.

"The day after this comes out," intoned Irwin Allen, "Natalie Gregory is a superstar." He had looked at more than 600 children for the part of Alice, some from as far away as England and France, when a friend called him to say that he should audition a young child who had shone in episodes of Cagney & Lacey and Magnum, P.I. The girl lives, ironically, not in Paris or Natalie Gregory

Liverpool but in Southern California's Orange County—and the producer examined her with a scrutiny approaching microscopic, knowing that no matter how many older stars he had signed, the production would die without a charismatic child in the central role. Natalie neither looked nor sounded like his vision of Alice—her hair was not sufficiently blonde for one thing—but she had a presence that no other child possessed, a star quality. And so Allen gave her the role and ordered a blonde wig designed.
Suddenly the little girl found herself the focal point of an estimated $14 million production, falling through a rabbit hole on an MGM set, not far away from the place where Judy Garland had done "The Wizard of Oz," and beginning an adventure that would lead to encounters with Lewis Carroll's otherwordly characters. She danced with Father William (Sammy Davis Jr., who also plays the Caterpillar), and she sang with the Mad Hatter (Anthony Newley). She did not spend time eyeing and gushing over Irwin Allen and Sammy Davis Junior

the celebrities, only Wonderland awed her. So in love was she with its mock forest and the living chess game that sometimes she would be simply staring wide-eyed, a little girl biting her finger and giggling over a chess piece magically walking off the board. You could see older people gravitating to her, the King of Hearts (Robert Morley) and the White Rabbit (Red Buttons) and, finally, Irwin Allen himself; she embodied something that they had wanted to find from the beginning - some innocence, a sense of wonderment.

This article by Michael Leahy first appeared in TV Guide Toronto December 1985.

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other

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