Princess Caraboo is a 1994 British-American historical comedy-drama film co-written (with John Wells) and directed by Michael Austin, based on the real-life 19th-century character Princess Caraboo, who passed herself off in British society as an exotic princess who spoke a strange foreign language; she is portrayed by Phoebe Cates.
In Regency England, an exotically dressed woman is found in the fields, speaking a language no one can understand. She ends up at the home of the Worrall family, the local gentry. Their Greek butler, Frixos thinks the woman is a fraud from the start. Mr. Worrall sends her to the magistrate to be tried for vagrancy, but Mrs. Worrall agrees to care for her. Mr. Gutch, a local printer and newspaper reporter, takes an interest in the case especially after the woman claims via pantomime to be Princess Caraboo.
Gutch talks to the farm workers who found her and learns she had a book from the Magdalene Hospital in London on her. When the Worralls leave on a trip the servants inspect her for a tattoo, which they believe all natives of the South Seas have and are shocked to find Princess Caraboo has one on her thigh. Frixos tells Gutch he now thinks she’s a genuine princess. Mr. Worrall uses her presence to recruit investors for the spice trade which will be facilitated by Princess Caraboo when she returns to her native land. Gutch brings in Professor Wilkinson, a linguist who is initially dismissive of Caraboo’s story, but has enough doubt to refuse to say she is a fraud.
Mary Baker (née Willcocks) (1791, Witheridge, Devonshire, England – 24 December 1864, Bristol, England) was a noted impostor. Posing as the fictional Princess Caraboo, Baker pretended to be from a far off island kingdom. Baker fooled a British town for some months.
On 3 April 1817, a cobbler in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire, England, met an apparently disoriented young woman wearing exotic clothes who was speaking an incomprehensible language. The cobbler's wife took this stranger to the Overseer of the Poor, who placed her in the hands of the local county magistrate, Samuel Worrall, who lived in Knole Park on the estate where Tower House is located. Worrall and his American-born wife Elizabeth could not understand her either; what they did determine was that she called herself Caraboo and that she was interested in Chinese imagery. They sent her to the local inn, where she identified a drawing of a pineapple with the word 'ananas', meaning pineapple in many Indo-European languages, and insisted on sleeping on the floor. Samuel Worrall declared she was a beggar and should be taken to Bristol and tried for vagrancy.