Meeting the Railway Man’s real family

Patti Lomax, whose story is told in Jonathan Teplitzky’s The Railway Man alongside that of her late husband, Eric Lomax, said she is very happy with the film of their lives.

“I feel very privileged to be here. My husband is the person who should be here but he died last October, so I’m representing him. There is a great joy in the fact that the film has been completed, and made so well. So far the reception has been very good and I hope it will continue.”

Of the cast, she said: “We have great respect for Colin and Jeremy Irvine (who play older and younger Eric Lomax) and Nicole Kidman.”

Producer Andy Paterson met with the Lomaxes starting more than 12 years ago. “We went on a journey with Patti and Eric to understand the story,” he says.

The story charts Eric Lomax’s coming to terms later in life with the trauma he suffered as a young man who was a Japanese prisoner of war forced to work on building the Thai-Burma railway. He returns to Asia to confront one of his abusers from decades before.

“Patti is being very modest, it was so important for her part of the story to be told, it’s about families who support people who come back from this kind of trauma,” Paterson added.

Teplitzky added: “I had been interested in the theme of forgiveness to explore in a movie. As soon as I read it, it was such a poignant and powerful story about forgiveness. It’s an incredibly unbelievable story. It represented the very worst and very best of human nature.”

And what was it like for Patti Lomax to see Colin Firth portraying her husband? “My husband had been ill for some time, so we weren’t as up to date with movie stars as we should have been. It wasn’t until my husband saw a picture of Colin Firth on the front page of The Daily Telegraph newspaper that he realised that here we had somebody famous for his film.

“I had heard of Colin because of the iconic scene in Pride & Prejudice, but I must be about the only woman in the Western world who wasn’t impressed by this, because it reminded me of one of my sons falling in a pond.”