JM Barrie's character has inspired plenty of plays, books and films. For all the story's fun, though, it is rather sinister.
From an article in the Guardian...
He soon got to know the boys' beautiful mother Sylvia, and also her unfortunate husband, Arthur. Barrie became indispensable to the boys, a playful companion and teller of tales. George seemed his favourite. To the mother, he was at least a very good friend and confidant; what the father made of him is a little more opaque. When Arthur died of cancer of the jaw, Barrie helped the family financially, sending the boys to Eton. As the sons grew older, his interest wandered from George to young Michael. Ansell left Barrie for a younger writer, Gilbert Cannan. When Sylvia herself succumbed to cancer, Barrie became the boys' guardian. Then George Llewelyn Davies died on the western front during the first world war; and after the war, Michael killed himself, drowning in the arms of a friend at Oxford. Barrie never recovered from the loss.
What motivated Barrie will always remain uncertain. Was he "in love" with George and then Michael? Was he attempting to return to his own boyhood through theirs? Did he love or lust after Sylvia? No one knows. What facilitated the friendships was Barrie's zest for fantasy combined with a sense of self-enclosure about the man. That his remoteness involved a possessing hunger for company was his – and the boys' – tragedy.
Yet out of his friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family emerged Barrie's various versions of the Peter Pan story. The tales long for a lost and heartless innocence, and are key texts in what has been perceived to be the golden age of children's literature, that series of great works running from The Water Babies to Winnie the Pooh. Though complex, out-of-kilter and puzzling, such books also evoke an enchanted quietness.
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