An actor is playing Claude Debussy in a film about the composer's life, and finds himself identifying with his subject very closely.

The L-Shaped Room follows a young French girl, Jane (Leslie Caron), who arrives alone at a boarding house in Fulham, London. Beautiful and withdrawn, she encounters the residents of her house through the meandering first act of the film, each a social outsider in their own way.
Jane is pregnant, we learn, and has no desire to marry the father. On her first visit to a doctor, she wants to find out if she really is pregnant and consider her options. The doctor's facile assumption that she must want either marriage or an abortion so insults her that she determines to have the child.