Is 'Philomena' a true story? Details about the 2013 Oscar-nominated drama film

Philomena is a 2013 drama film directed by Stephen Frears, based on the 2009 book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by journalist Martin Sixsmith. Philomena plot revolves around Philomena Lee's 50-year search for her adopted son and Sixsmith's efforts to help her find him. Here is everything you need to know about the 2013 film and if it is a true story or not.

Is Philomena a true story? 

According to a report by The Sun, the film is based on a real incident of an elderly Irishwoman’s search for a son she was forced to give up for adoption fifty years earlier and was desperate to find. Philomena Lee, now 85 years old, from Limerick, Ireland, was the inspiration behind the Oscar-nominated film after she was forcibly separated from her son, Anthony, in an Irish convent in 1952. Her son Anthony was sold to an American family for £2000, while she was in the convent's laundry room.

Philomena was an unmarried woman in the 1950s and was impregnated by a local boy, after which her father kicked her out and she sought refuge at a convent. While at the convent, Philomena was made to sign a contract that said that once born, her baby could be sold by the Catholic Church to a family looking to adopt, and having no other option left, she did exactly that. At the age of nineteen, she gave birth to Anthony in the convent and after eight weeks of nursing him, took a job at the convent's laundry room to support herself. 

An American woman came to the convent three years later and decided to adopt Mary, Philomena's best friend Kathleen's daughter but since Anthony and Mary were inseparable, the woman adopted them both despite having three sons already and took the kids back to America from Ireland. After her son got adopted, she was thrown out of the convent, which is when she moved to England and joined a boys' school and cut all ties with her Catholic faith. At the age of 23, she decided that she wanted to make a career for herself and moved to St. Albans in Hertfordshire, where she worked at a psychiatric hospital for 30 years.

While working in the hospital she met her husband and had her daughter, Jane but never opened up about her past for the next fifty years. Her daughter Jane took it upon herself to find out what happened to her half-brother and asked journalist Martin Sixsmith to help investigate what happened to Anthony after being separated from his mother. Sixsmith found out information about Anthony, who was renamed Michael Hess by his adoptive parents, and revealed that he passed away at the age of 43 from AIDS. She was also told that when Anthony had grown up, he went to search for his birth mother in Ireland on three separate occasions, but was lied to by the convent authorities each time. 

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