The Shell Seekers plot
Artist daughter Penelope Keeling (Vanessa Redgrave) can look back on a varied life. She is the daughter of distinguished painter Lawrence Sterne (Maximilian Schell). She has a free-spirited childhood in London and enjoys the natural beauty of Cornwall. She has an unhappy marriage during the war but also meets the only man she truly loves. She has three very different children: Olivia (Victoria Hamilton), her 'special child' who, like her, is tough but also very vulnerable. Noel (Charles Edwards), her reckless and selfish son, and finally Nancy (Victoria Hamilton), her eldest, whose life is mostly embittered by jealousy and greed. A minor heart attack gives the sixty-year-old woman time to examine her past. After leaving the hospital, Penelope returns to her shabby cottage in the English countryside. Her children persuade her to sell her father's paintings in order to recover financially. She travels to Ibiza where she stays with her daughter Olivia and her boyfriend Cosmo. There she meets Antonia (Stephanie Stumph), a woman who finds herself in the midst of a passionate romance, something Penelope realizes has only recently experienced.