Woman in Gold is the remarkable true story of one woman’s journey to reclaim her heritage and seek justice for what happened to her family.
Sixty years after she fled Vienna during World War II, an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann, starts her journey to retrieve family possessions seized by the Nazis, among them Klimt’s famous painting ‘The Lady in Gold’.
Together with her inexperienced but plucky young lawyer Randy Schoenberg, she embarks upon a major battle which takes them all the way to the heart of the Austrian establishment and the U.S. Supreme Court, and forces her to confront difficult truths about the past along the way.
Maria Altmann (February 18, 1916 February 7, 2011), who the film is based on (played by Helen Mirren) was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria, noted for her ultimately successful legal campaign to reclaim from the Government of Austria five family-owned paintings by the artist Gustav Klimt stolen by the Nazis during World War II.