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So when she saw her aunt’s health failing, Diana Bolan encouraged Donahue to sell the home she shared with Henschel and move into an assisted living facility. When she died, you know - I have her picture on my fridge, and I know she’s watching over me. It was a bond that was so strong,” said the elder Bolan. And when she was 13 and her father’s alcoholism began to impact the family, Bolan was invited by her aunt to stay with her in Chicago for two weeks to escape the stressful environment. When Bolan’s parents were struggling financially, Donahue sent the family $20 a month so they could purchase a washer and dryer. Growing up, she had been particularly close with Donahue. Which is how the director’s mother, Diana Bolan, inadvertently became one of the film’s stars. We had no choice, because it started to take over,” he said. The story - which he’d initially envisioned as an inspiring tale of a love that defied the odds - had shifted. When he returned to Illinois to begin filming, she had thinned dramatically and her hand had developed a tremor. But by the time she’d agreed to help him make the documentary, it was 2013, and Donahue’s health was rapidly declining. So he approached different producers, eventually connecting with a casting director he’d met during his graduate studies at NYU, Alexa L.
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But Bolan - whose background is as an actor and theater director - had never made a film.
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He was so moved by their tales that soon he was mulling how to bring their journey to the masses.
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He embraced them, told them he was proud of them, and listened as they began to share years of stories about their relationship. That changed during a 2009 visit to Chicago, when, over rum and Cokes, the couple confessed their secret to Bolan. After they had been asked, we just kind of let it go. And you have to remember that Pat was engaged to three men, and Terry had boyfriends. “Everyone keeps asking me: ‘How in the world can your family not have thought they were gay?’” the filmmaker recalled from his home in suburban New York. I hope you feel the same way, too.”īut growing up, Bolan was none the wiser to their hidden relationship. Henschel was so besotted with Donahue that one night, on the back of an ice hockey ticket, she confessed: “I’m a reader of books, but I’ve never read anywhere where a woman loves another woman. In fact, they had fallen in love in their early 20s after meeting at an ice rink. Instead, they lied, insisting that rent in their adopted city of Chicago was so high that they couldn’t afford to live alone and that they were strictly platonic roommates with boyfriends. For years, they’d hid their relationship, afraid that their relatives would disown them if they knew the women were lesbians. It was 2009, and Henschel and Donahue had only just revealed to their family that they were gay. So when Bolan asked if she and her wife would be open to telling their love story on-camera, she didn’t hesitate: “Oh, we love you, Christopher! Anything I can do,” the director recalled.
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But since the film went up on the streaming platform, some intrepid viewers have tracked down the telephone number of her elder care home and left her fan messages.Īs a professional athlete, Donahue became accustomed to doing interviews. It wasn’t that long ago that Henschel even learned what Netflix was. The film - directed by Donahue’s grand-nephew, Chris Bolan - finds the couple in their late 80s, when after decades of hiding their homosexuality they decide to publicly come out and get married. Their 70-year relationship is at the center of the documentary “A Secret Love,” which debuted on Netflix late last month. Especially because the way she’s been filling most of her time - aside from reading and watching television - is by talking about her late love, Terry Donahue. She’s felt the absence more acutely this spring, as the pandemic has forced her to isolate from other residents. People here are so nice, and they try to fill my life with their presence. “You know, it’s just like half of my heart has gone away,” Henschel, 91, said. She still lives in the apartment they shared at a Canadian assisted living facility, where a large headshot of her spouse rests on the kitchen counter. It’s been just over a year since Pat Henschel’s wife died.