Adaline Bowman is a lucky woman: she died in the freezing water after crashing her car into a ravine but was revived by a perfectly placed lightning strike. Mother nature not only resurrected her – it gave her the gift of immortality. The Age of Adeline isn’t a superhero movie; it’s a romance film about a woman destined to remain 29 forever.
Immortality might seem like a gift, but to Adaline, it’s a curse that prevents her from forming bonds with people. She tries to escape Michiel Huisman’s love but has a change of heart, inadvertently lifting the burden that has plagued her for 107 years.
Adaline Bowman is a fictional character written by J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz
Adaline Bowman is not a real character and isn’t inspired by any real-life person. In the film, we see Adaline craft a litany of fake identities to evade capture by authorities seeking to study her.
It is improbable that an immortal woman, even with the best fake identities, can escape capture for over six decades. If a person came back to life through a lightning strike and stopped aging, it would make international news, spark conspiracy theories, send religious leaders into frenzies, and in this age, melt the internet.
In a nutshell, Adeline Bowman’s story isn’t real. It’s a fictional tale written by Salvador Paskowitz and J. Mills Goodloe.
Bowman isn’t inspired by V.E. Schwab’s book The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Adaline Bowman and Adaline LaRue share a fundamental similarity: they are immortal women who cannot form emotional connections with people.
In V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, a god gifted Addie eternal life on the condition that everyone she met would forget her after one encounter. Everything changes when she meets a man who, unlike the people she’s met over the past three decades, remembers her name.
The lives of both Adalines change after connecting romantically with men. The similarities between their stories have led to connections between The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and The Age of Adeline.
In Kat Impossible’s review of Schwab’s book in Life And Other Disasters, Kat wrote:
“Addie is short for Adeline and throughout this whole book, I could not stop thinking of The Age of Adaline. I am very much aware that Schwab worked on this story for years and that they are not alike, but both involve more or less immortal women and bookish handsome men and … my brain would not stop going there.”
As Kat mentions, there’s no connection between the publication and production. It is possible, however, that Schwab drew inspiration from the film when writing her book.