Is 'Flowers in the Attic' Based on a True Story? (2024)

FAQs

Is Flowers in the Attic based off a true story? ›

No, Flowers In The Attic: The Origin is not based on a true story.

Flowers in the Attic may have been based in part on a true story. According to editor Ann Patty, Andrews always told her that the core of the story had really happened to a doctor she had once had when she had been in the hospital for spinal surgery.

“There was nothing unholy about it,” the mother cheerfully tells her children about her marriage to her own half-uncle, which meant that the kids' own father was also their great-uncle.

Andrews always maintained that the plot of Flowers in the Attic was “a fictionalised version of a true story” that a hospital doctor had told her when she was a teenager.

Alpert changed it to Chris angrily shaking his sister and immediately feeling bad about it. Then they sleep together. The rape scene was in the original script, but both Lifetime executives and Alpert felt it didn't belong (this well before a then-13-year-old Kiernan Shipka was cast as Cathy).

Christopher Foxworth was the son of Garland and Alicia Foxworth and younger half-brother of Malcolm Neal Foxworth as well as the uncle of Corrine Foxworth whom he later married.

Later that year, at a Christmas Party, Cathy ambushes Corrine and forces her to reveal that she locked away her children and poisoned them. After being pressed by Cathy, she confesses, but adding in her side of the story: that her father had known that the children were locked away and forced her to poison them.

Even though Carrie was extroverted prior to her experiences in the attic, she is meek and mousy afterward. Carrie suffers and becomes very ill when she and her siblings are poisoned by arsenic-laced doughnuts. The poisoning stunts her growth and she never really becomes well.

Flowers in the Attic was banned from numerous districts for depictions of child abuse and incest. Everyone still read it.

Before they can leave, Chris is killed in a car accident- mirroring their father's death. His death leaves everyone devastated. No one is more heartbroken than Cathy, who loses the will to live and dies in her sleep in the attic a year later.

Did Chris and Cathy have a baby? ›

Cathy was actually pregnant by Chris.

Not only do Cathy and Chris never get over their attraction to each other (more on that later), but also, in Petals on the Wind, Cathy realizes she had miscarried a child and that it's not the progeny of her fiancé at the time — it would have been Chris's baby.

At the station, Chris reveals he discovered Corinne's inheritance is conditional upon her having no children from her first marriage, and she, rather than the grandmother, was the one who most likely poisoned them.

Cathy and Chris learned that their parents were half-uncle and half-niece, (later revealed as half siblings) and had eloped together years before. Things came tumbling down when their grandmother accused Cathy and Chris of being in a relationship, and their mother abandoned them to pursue a young attorney.

This telling of the true story of a heinous ,evil, child murder in a small village in Dublin in 1973 makes for a gripping read. David Malone sets the story within the context of the influence of the Catholic church on Irish society at this point in history.

After the unexpected death of their father, The Dollengangher children and their mother, Corrine, move to their grandmother's home. The grandmother locks them in a room and forces them to be hidden from the outside world.

Tired of trying to push her feelings away, Corrine had confronted Christopher and told him that she's in love with him. He reciprocated and then the two proceeded to sleep together in Malcolm's mother's bed, the same place he raped both Olivia and Alicia.

"Shadows" does mention that Olivia's mother locked her in the closet as punishment when she misbehaved. In Garden of Shadows, Malcolm Jr. dies at Foxworth Hall in a motorcycle accident; in Flowers in the Attic, Corrine tells her children that he died at a cabin he had built.

At some point, probably his early adult life, Garland married a beautiful woman name, Corrine. They had a son, Malcolm. At some point, Corrine fell in love with someone else and abandoned Garland and young Malcolm to run off with her lover.

Type of Villain

She is a religious fanatic who physically and psychologically abuses her grandchildren, whom she keeps imprisoned in an attic with the complicity of her daughter Corrine Dollanganger, the children's mother. In the 1987 film adaptation, she was portrayed by Louise Fletcher.

Olivia Foxworth is the strictly religious wife of Malcolm Foxworth and mother of Malcolm Jr., Joel, and Corrine Foxworth and the cruel and wicked grandmother of the Dollanganger children.

Is Christopher related to Tony or Carmela? ›

Christopher Moltisanti is Tony's nephew and Carmela's first cousin. His father Dickie Moltisanti was something of a mentor to the youthful Tony. So when the senior Moltisanti was shot to death, Tony, in turn, took Christopher under his wing.

He loves his mother as he loves a woman and he hates his father. As in Sophocles' play about Oedipus the king, he wants to be with his mother and he loves her more than anything. Oedipus married his mother, and killed his father which is almost what Malcolm does later on in the book as well.

Corrine says she stashed the body in a ravine, but Cathy accuses her of hiding Cory's body in a small room off the attic that gave off a telltale odor. Chris bursts into the library, and Corrine perceives him as the ghost of his father, her first husband. She suffers a mental breakdown and sets fire to Foxworth Hall.

It is Cathy that Carrie confesses to about Julian's sexual abuse and the fact that their mother denied her on the street. In her suicide note, Carrie confesses that she sometimes forgot that Cathy and Chris were only her older siblings and not her real parents.

In the last months of imprisonment in the attic, Cory becomes seriously ill with arsenic poisoning (sprinkled onto powdered donuts). Corrine and the Grandmother take him away and he later dies, leaving the older children devastated (especially Carrie).

Her attempts to keep them all safe ultimately push Olivia to become to most terrifying version of herself, leading to her inevitable—and notorious—decision to lock her grandchildren in the attic.

Type of Villain

Corrine Dollanganger is the main antagonist of the 1987 novel, Flowers in The Attic and its film adaptation. She is a greedy, narcissistic woman who imprisons her children in her mother's attic and kills her own son and daughter so she will be the sole beneficiary of her wealthy father's estate.

The reasoning being that Malcolm disapproved of Corrine's marriage because her husband was his half-brother, meaning her marriage was incestuous, as she married her half-uncle to the anger of Olivia and Malcolm.

Flowers in the Attic is about this 12-year-old girl named Cathy whose family is picture-perfect: awesome dad, gorgeous mom, cool-as-ice older brother Chris, adorable twin toddlers, lots of fancy presents. But then the dad dies in a car accident — on his 36th birthday!

Christopher/Daddy- He is married to Corrine and is father to the 4 kids. Grandmother- Mother of Corrine. She is a uptight old woman who believe in being a perfect christian woman. She helps hide the kids in the attic while they wait for the grandfather to die.

Is the woman in the attic a true story? ›

The Woman In The Attic : The True Story of Blanche Monnier.

Cathy was actually pregnant by Chris.

Not only do Cathy and Chris never get over their attraction to each other (more on that later), but also, in Petals on the Wind, Cathy realizes she had miscarried a child and that it's not the progeny of her fiancé at the time — it would have been Chris's baby.