Annie Philomena Lee is an Irish woman whose life was chronicled in the 2009 book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith. The book was made into a film titled Philomena, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Lead Actress for Judi Dench's portrayal of Philomena, and Best Picture. Lee is now an advocate and spokesperson for adoption rights. Lee has created The Philomena Project in order to raise awareness about adoption laws and find ways to improve them. In February 2014, she met Pope Francis to discuss the Catholic church's adoption policies.
Personal life
Lee was born Annie Philomena Lee in County Limerick, Ireland in 1933. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Lee was six. Her father, a butcher, sent Lee and her sisters, Kaye and Mary, to a convent school and kept his sons at home. After Lee completed her formal education at the convent, she went to live with her maternal aunt, Kitty Madden. She married in 1959, had two more children, Jane and Kevin, and worked as a nurse. She divorced her first husband and later remarried.
Pregnancy
When she was 18, Philomena became pregnant by a man named John, who worked for the post office. She was then sent to the Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, a place for unwed mothers. After giving birth to a son, she was incarcerated in and worked unpaid at the Abbey, where she was forced to stay until she was 22. As commonly happened during the scandal of the Roman Catholic church's treatment of unmarried mothers in Ireland at the time, the church sold the child, then aged 3, without maternal consent, to be adopted by a Catholic family. He was taken to the United States, and the Catholic Church hid these facts from Philomena. She was forced into signing the adoption papers. She eventually left the Abbey and moved to England.
Book
Around Christmas, in 2003, Lee revealed to her family that she had given birth to a son when she was 19, and she did not know his whereabouts. For decades, she had secretly been trying to find out what had happened to her son, without success. Her daughter, Jane, decided to approach journalist Martin Sixsmith at a New Year's Eve Party a few weeks later. She explained Philomena's story and asked Sixsmith whether he would be interested in helping them find out what had happened to the child. Sixsmith agreed to take on the story. He and Philomena spent years researching, until they discovered that her son had been put up for adoption by the nuns at the Abbey. He was taken by an American couple, Doc and Marge Hess, and named Michael Hess. The Hesses had adopted a little girl named Mary, also from the Abbey, and Mary and Michael had grown up together. They learned that he had died of AIDS in 1995, at the age of 43, and that he had tried, without success, to find his mother. Before his death he arranged to be buried at the Sean Ross Abbey, in the hope that his mother would find his grave which she eventually did.
