Anne-Marie O'Connor

Anne-Marie O'Connor is an American journalist and writer who authored The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. This bestselling story is about the eight-year legal battle by Vienna emigre Maria Altmann, represented by Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, to reclaim five Gustav Klimt paintings from her native Austria. This saga that also inspired a Harvey Weinstein movie, Woman in Gold, in which Helen Mirren played Maria Altmann. One of the paintings, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, sold for a record $135 million in 2006 to Ronald Lauder's Neue Galerie New York, where the painting is on view.

Life A longtime journalist in Latin America, O'Connor covered the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador as a Central America bureau chief for Reuters. She was also a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, UPI, and the Cox Newspaper chain, and she has written for Esquire, the Christian Science Monitor, and The Nation. She is a speaker on the subject of the Nazi plunder of art and restitution.

Selected works