Trivia / Philomena

• Dawson Casting: Minor, unusual example. Dench actually is the same age as Philomena in real life. However, given how this takes place in 2004, 50 years after Lee gives birth to Anthony, the oldest she could be in the film would be around 68, whereas Dench was around 78 during filming.
• Corrupt Church: Real Life example of yet another tragedy out of the systematic brutalization of Irish women in so-called "homes" for unmarried mothers. This came out in 2013, when the facts about places like Sean Ross Abbey had been heavily publicized, yet Catholic critics blasted the book and film and called them completely false. Sixsmith explained exactly what he found in the course of the search for Anthony-Michael.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Sister Hildegard was played by veteran actress Barbara Jefford. In a case of Playing Against Type, Jeffords plays the uptight, censorious, angrily anti-sex Sister Hildegarde, when her most famous role is as the relaxed and very sensual Molly Bloom in the 1967 film of Ulysses. Also, by coincidence instead of a case of Actor Allusion or Casting Gag, in the 1968 film The Shoes of the Fisherman, Jefford played a medical doctor in Rome who has a chance encounter with the (fictional) Pope himself and then asks for his views about her marital problems with her straying husband.
• Real-Life Relative: Tadhg and Saoirse Bowen play Anthony/Michael and Mary as children.