“How’s my German?,” asked British actor Allan Corduner who plays Gustav Bloch-Bauer in the film Woman in Gold. He’s Maria Altmann’s father, in flashback to pre-war and Nazi occupied Vienna, when she was a young woman who managed to escape. Helen Mirren plays Maria’s older version, and they had only one scene together, when Maria, in a time close to the present, walks through the magnificent apartment she was forced to leave, seeing the ghosts of her murdered family in their glory. As stories evoking the terrible history of the Holocaust go, this one, based on true events, has a fairy tale happy ending, as Maria Altmann with her lawyer, E.Randol Schoenberg, grandson of the famed composer Arnold Schoenberg, take on the Austrian government to claim paintings by Gustav Klimt, stolen, like much property owned by Jews.
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