Oprah Winfrey was, for ten years, the owner of Gustav Klimt's second-most-famous portrait of the subject of the painting unofficially known as "Woman in Gold." The second most famous Klimt portrait of Bloch-Bauer was officially titled "Adele Bloch-Bauer ll." Winfrey reportedly bought the painting anonymously in 2006, when Christie's sold it at auction for $87.9 million, during the same auction session when the subject of this film was sold, along with four other Klimt paintings owned by Maria Altmann's family. In 2016, Winfrey sold the 54"x54" painting, "Adele Bloch-Bauer II," to a Chinese collector for $150 million.
The real E. Randol Schoenberg is seen in the final scene of Dame Helen Mirren (Maria Altmann, his client) going around and imagining her old apartment, who looks to raise his glass in a toast directly at the camera - so, to her, Altmann's point-of-view.
Maria Altmann is shown to be the proprietor of a clothing store. After the war, her brother-in-law set up a textile factory in Liverpool. One of the items he produced was cashmere, which is an extremely soft wool that was not available in the United States before that time. He also sent Maria a sample cashmere sweater to see if Americans might like it. She took the sweater to Kerr's Department Store in Beverly Hills, California, USA, where she took an order for cashmere sweaters from them. After the sweaters began to sell, other stores across America ordered them as well. As a result, Maria eventually started her own clothing business. In this movie, you can see a mannequin dressed in a cashmere sweater in the scene in her shop.
In 2005, a federal judge in Brooklyn approved a $21.8 million award to the surviving members of the two families, the Bloch-Bauer and Pick families, which owned the sugar company with other investors in Austria.
Before the escape shown in this movie, Maria Altmann's husband, Fritz, was arrested by the Nazis and held at the Dachau concentration camp for nearly two months in order to force his brother, Bernhard, who had already escaped to France, to transfer his ownership of his company to the Nazis. Fritz was released, then put on house arrest for three months up until his escape.