Virginia Commonwealth University Alumni Association Online, 6 May 2005
**Thanks, Lena

After receiving her training at the Department of Physical Therapy on VCU’s MCV Campus, Anne Kilpatrick Lorio ’01MS(PT)/AH is now a physical therapist at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia. She was a consultant on the film Warm Springs, about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s struggle with polio, first shown on HBO on April 30. Throughout his life, F.D.R. hid his disability as much as possible from his fellow Americans.

The press release below from the Shepherd Center, where several patients also had roles in the movie, explains how Lorio helped Kenneth Branagh make his portrayal historically accurate.

Warm Springs
Look closely at HBO’s upcoming movie, Warm Springs, and you’ll notice some familiar faces. The movie traces the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s struggle against the disabling effects of polio and his rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Georgia. The stars are Emmy award winners Kenneth Branagh and Cynthia Nixon. But it’s the other actors – Shepherd Center patients – who might just steal the show when you watch.

Teal Sherer, Marshall Hamilton, Laurel Lawson, and Margo Gathright-Dietrich all have roles in the movie, which was shot last fall at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation and other locations in Georgia including Atlanta. Although none have speaking roles, the characters are integral to the story line. Teal, Laurel and Margo perform a song and dance routine in a key scene in which FDR is preparing to buy the Warm Springs facility. Marshall portrays one of the Warm Springs guests in a scene at the pool.

Other than the familiar faces in the film, Shepherd Center was closely involved with several other aspects of the movie, so much so that producers thanked the Center in the ending credits.

While preparing to portray FDR in the movie, Kenneth Branagh – who is well known for his roles in film adaptations of Shakespearean plays, as well as Hollywood blockbusters like "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" – sought assistance from Shepherd therapists to help him convincingly portray a person with paraplegia.

Warm Springs follows FDR as he contracted polio in 1921 at age 39. He was left paralyzed from the waist down. At the time there was no known cause of, or cure for, polio, and the practice of the day was to hide anyone with the disability away from the public eye. He seeks out a "miracle" cure in the backwoods of rural Georgia. As his wife Eleanor (Cynthia Nixon) takes up the mantle of the public Roosevelt, Franklin battles the stigma of polio and encounters those affected not just by disability, but by poverty, illiteracy and racism. In time he comes to learn that though he may never walk again, he can still lead. In Warm Springs, with help from a devoted therapist (Kathy Bates) and, eventually, his chief aide and wife, a future four-term president finds his personal and political soul.

Branagh – who often delves into the lives of the people he will portray in order to give a more convincing performance – spent some time at Shepherd with Anne Lorio, a PT for the senior team in the multi-specialty care unit. Since Lorio had worked with post-polio patients, producers asked her to teach the actor how a paraplegic might move his body using a wheelchair and leg braces from the 1920s.

"We watched video images of President Roosevelt walking with long leg braces, and then I taught Kenneth how to walk like Roosevelt did with braces," Lorio said. "We worked in the parallel bars and out of the parallel bars with one arm on an assistant and the other with a cane, which is what Roosevelt did in his later years. He had several questions about the script that I helped answer. For example, in one of the scenes, Roosevelt’s leg spasms and Kenneth didn't know what that would look like, so I showed him."

Producers of the movie also spent some time with Shepherd aquatic specialist Brenda Wright, asking questions about setting up key scenes in the movie where FDR swims in a lake.

The help from Shepherd staffers was invaluable, in part because the cast and crew had little historical record to go on. Roosevelt hid his paralysis from the country and was virtually never filmed or photographed in his wheelchair. He thought that if the nation knew about his disability, they would not vote for him.

The movie had premiers in Los Angeles, Warm Springs and Atlanta this month and critics have roundly praised the film.