For years, Margaret Keane was kept behind locked doors - painting the pictures of the wide-eyed waifs that made her husband Walter Keane an art sensation.
Feted by celebrities during the 1950s and 60s, Walter, ever a showman, took credit for his wife's work until Margaret found the courage to come forward and tell the truth.
Margaret met Walter in 1955 when he charmed her at an outdoor art exhibition in San Francisco.
Divorced, with a daughter, they soon married - and soon Walter was passing off Margaret's paintings of the sad children as his own, along with the story that they were based on youngsters he had seen in postwar Berlin in 1946.
When a customer asked her 'Do you paint too?' she realized Walter was taking the credit for her work.
Staying with Walter for the sake of her daughter - while the paintings were printed on to postcards and posters sold in millions across America - Margaret was kept a virtual prisoner in her own home while her husband frolicked in the pool outside - and brought other women into their bed.
Banned from having her own friends, she told The Guardian: 'The door was always locked, the curtains closed...when he wasn’t home he’d usually call every hour to make sure I hadn’t gone out. I was in jail.
'He was always pressuring me to do more. 'Do one with a clown costume'.’ Or: ‘Do two children on a rocking horse.'
Walter, it must be said, could not paint, a fact Margaret would seize upon, when finally in a court case in a 1986 - 21 years after they divorced - she was declared to be the true creator of the paintings.
The verdict came only after a judge asked both Margaret and Walter to paint in court. Walter claimed he had a sore shoulder and could not pick up a brush.
Margaret was awarded $4 million, but she never saw a penny of it as Walter, an alcoholic, had drunk his fortune away. A court psychologist diagnosed him with a rare mental condition called delusional disorder.
Walter died in 2000 and making the decision to turn her life story and what was once so painful into a movie, was not an easy decision, Margaret says.
