Former champion racehorse Dream Alliance, 19, has been immortalised in a film
He rose to victory in 2009 Welsh Grand National and is now enjoying retirement
Dreamy now enjoys his life in Somerset with former stable girl Clare Sandercock
His uplifting tale saw his modest start and he overcame injury to rise to success
The film Dream Horse, released yesterday, stars Damian Lewis and Toni Collette
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3/5
Toni Collette produces a turn that Euros Lyn’s film, about a Welsh racehorse that brought success to an ex-mining village, doesn’t deserve
3 June 2021 • 4:52pm
Toni Collette, writes Robbie Collin, is by some distance the best thing in Dream Horse
Credit: Kerry Brown
Dir: Euros Lyn. Starring: Toni Collette, Damian Lewis, Owen Teale, Karl Johnson, Siân Phillips, Lynda Baron, Joanna Page, Nicholas Farrell. PG cert, 113 mins
The word ‘underdog’ doesn’t feel sufficiently species-appropriate for this comic drama about a champion Welsh racehorse of humble origins: perhaps instead we should call it a classic nags-to-riches yarn, or an uplifting true tale of whinnier takes all. It is a fictionalised, feel-good-ified take on the early life of Dream Alliance, a chestnut gelding raised on an allotment in a South Wales mining village which went on to experience the kind of against-the-odds, social-class-defying success that causes British film producers to start salivating