TORONTO - Canada's red-headed sweetheart, Anne Shirley, returns to television this weekend with "Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning," but this time, the free-spirited character is not the same orphan fans may recall from the beloved books.

Early in the film, we learn that Anne's mother died under shameful circumstances and that Anne may actually have a father who is eager to rekindle their severed relationship. What unfolds is a reinterpretation of the imaginative child's origins, which writer, producer and director Kevin Sullivan says is based in large part on the journals of author Lucy Maud Montgomery.

"Lucy Maud was a gifted storyteller who was haunted all her life by her own childhood -- a girl who had experienced the death of her mother at a young age and a poignant, lifelong estrangement from her father," Sullivan says in promotional material for the film.

"Anne became her true alter-ego."

In the original tale, Anne's parents die of fever when she is just a baby.

In this three-hour movie, the precocious child -- played by a 12-year-old Toronto actress Hannah Endicott-Douglas -- buries a different set of disappointments deep into her psyche, and they surface decades later in an adult Anne -- played by U.S. actress Barbara Hershey -- who has become a successful writer and raised a family of her own.

Hershey says she was initially unaware of the Green Gables tales and their devoted fanbase, but says she relished exploring the textured character of the older Anne, a woman troubled by her past and the unknown fate of her only son Dominic, who has yet to return from the Second World War.

"I loved the idea about owning the past in terms of the present and the freeing aspect of what she goes through in terms of her revelations," Hershey says in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, adding she based her physical interpretation of the older Anne on film legend Katharine Hepburn.

"It's almost like she earns the optimism she always had, you know. This is kind of a cleansing effect of this kind of knowledge about yourself. Also, I loved that it's such a guileless character, you know. What she thinks, she shows, there's nothing hidden with her and that kind of openness was really appealing to me. It was unusual in a character to be that open."

The film also stars Oscar-winner Shirley MacLaine as matriarch Amelia Thomas, a character who pops up only briefly in Montgomery's first novel but has been shaped into a principal character for the film.

MacLaine, too, said she was charmed by the sweet tale of perseverance and optimism, and marvelled at the enduring appeal of the turn-of-the century legend.

"I was so pleased to see that this kind of, I don't know, institutionalized antiquity can work," MacLaine said during a telephone interview from her home in New Mexico.

"This whole project was a `heartback,' let's say, of going back in time in my heart -- to what it was like to have those teenage things that I loved to read."

The movie's timeline flips between the end of the Second World War and to Anne's earliest years, when she forges an intense imagination as a means of survival.

MacLaine's character is a wealthy and strong-willed widow who runs the prosperous lumber town, Marysville, N.B.

But like many others to come, her miserable demeanour softens as she gets to know the imaginative and playful Anne.

MacLaine says she was familiar with the tale before coming to the project, noting that her mother is from Nova Scotia. She says she's identified more with her maternal half during the past eight years of George W. Bush's controversial U.S. presidency.

"In travelling around the world... they ask me who am I, and I say,`I'm a Canadian,"' says MacLaine.

"I spent a lot of time in Nova Scotia, I'd love to shoot something there."

"Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning" airs on CTV on Sunday.