Philomena

When she fell pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a "fallen woman". When her child was three, he was taken to America for adoption. She never saw him again, and would spend the next 50 years searching for her son, not knowing that he was doing the same thing. Renamed Michael Hass, he grew up to be a top lawyer and then a Republican politician in the first Bush administration. He was also gay, and had to conceal not only his sexuality, but the fact that he had AIDS. In his last months he flew back to the convent to plead with the nuns to tell him who his mother was. When they refused he asked only that he be buried within the grounds of the convent with enough information on his gravestone for his mother to identify him "if she ever came looking".