Woman in Gold is a remarkable story of one women’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 (Mirren) starts her journey to retrieve family possessions seized by the Nazis, among them Klimt’s famous painting, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Together with her inexperienced but determined young lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Reynolds), she embarks upon a major battle which takes them all the way to the heart of Austrian establishment and the U.S. Supreme Court, and forces her to confront difficult truths along the way.
E. Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl and the winner of numerous awards in the field of litigation, is an expert in handling cases involving looted art and the recovery of property stolen by the Nazi authorities during the Holocaust. Among his most prominent cases is that of “Republic of Austria v. Altmann” which resulted in the successful return of five paintings by Gustav Klimt, including the “Woman in Gold,” to their rightful owner. Schoenberg graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and a certificate in European Cultural Studies and received his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Southern California