Hugh Bonneville is excellent as Dahl, even looks like him, and Keeley does a workmanlike job as Patricia Neal but there's little to enjoy about the film really. It's largely factual so a good way to learn more about Dahl's life. I've given it 7 as I can't really fault the acting but it's a pretty gloomy piece all in all.

In roles previously played by Dirk Bogarde and Glenda Jackson, Hugh Bonneville and Keeley Hawes are now the writer Roald Dahl and his actress wife Patricia Neal. Both Bonneville and Hawes are very fine actors in their own right, if perhaps more famous on television than in the cinema and anyone who, in recent years, has seen "Bodyguard", "Line of Duty" or "It's a Sin" will know just what a chameleon Hawes can be and you think that even an Oscar-winning American actress might not be a stretch and that Dahl would be a walk in the park for Bonneville.

As befits a film about the author of children's books, John Hay;s film "To Olivia" is as much about the children in the Dahl/Neal marriage as it is about the adults but despite decent work all round this never rises above a conventional Sunday night BBC or ITV drama, (and good as Hawes is, she's certainly not Neal). Quite frankly, this could be a movie about any middle-class couple living in any English village and finding they don't get along and you certainly won't learn anything about either of its central celebrities. Both Neal and Dahl had their fair share of tragedy, treated here as soap opera. As Geoffrey Fisher, one-time Archbishop of Canterbury, the wonderful Geoffrey Palmer has no trouble stealing the film but ultimately this is a film that is not worth stealing or indeed seeing.

That tells the more hidden /oblivious parts of writer roald dahls life as a familyman father and husband, acted superbly hugh bonneville. in his first marriage he had 5 children, among them the name of the ntitle olivia. olivia died due to encephalities after a short period sickness of measles, a common outcome of one of the socalled'' child diseases''.

its a heartbreaking biographicall we all witness, on different reactions and crisis management,where the traditional ways of mourning in the british society where mens and womens reactions in those days where kutymised and feelings especially for mails were rather rough and icecold, and weakness of crying unheard of. even the verbal use of the name olivia meant hardships for years to the author. its also the story about tessa, that was olivias sister and playmate at near same age, and how her sisters death became a story of guilt and anxiousness, especially towards her father.

productionwise, its perfectly precise on the era of time, its a filmatographic masterpiece, the score subtle and grevious, and the set designs and used localities are upfront work. the cast delivers beyond expectations, and they have managed to display the grell and sad emotions as well as the weather in that part of the world

its a film that many who've lost a young child will find reckognizabel, and may awaken strong emotions, to all those do not watch this film alone, do see this as a group therapy as a tool to commemorate what you had and still have left in the memories. i cant guarantee a cry-free evening after watching this, therefore a recommend from the grumpy old man