Well, think about it. If they tried making it the way it really was, it would take the fun and the magic out of the story. Who cares if they changed the facts? Movies are for entertainment.

It sure doesn't portray a "true story."
Harry Houdini had NO involvement whatsoever. The girls were 16 and 10 when they took the faked photos and by the time sir author conon got involved, Elsie was 19! There were so many lies in this "true story."
All in all it's a fun movie but it is simply wrong to call it "true." No wonder mel didn't want to be credited.

Don't get me wrong, but the girls in the film didn't really do what the Cottingley girls did.
Didn't they? As in real life, they used cut-out pictures to create photographs that appeared to be of fairies.
When they admitted the hoax, the real girls (by then old women), claimed that though the pictures were fake, there were real fairies. So the movie is pretty darn close to being entirely true to their version of the story whether there ever were real fairies is, of course, a little harder to establish convincingly.

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They are both dead now. Frances, I believe, was born around 1899.

They're dead; I don't know for how long, but I do know that Frances was alive as of the late 1980s.

I believe that they both had died before the movie was made. I'm not positive though. I am actually watching the movie right now. I have seen it once before, back in 1997 when it was in the movie theatres. I remember reading an article about them and I vaugly remember reading that they were dead. Of course, this was over half a decade ago so I could very well be wrong.