Sarah Conlon was an Irish housewife and a prominent campaigner in one of the most high-profile miscarriage of justice cases in British legal history.
14 Facts About Sarah Conlon
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Sarah Conlon spent decades clearing the names of her husband Giuseppe and son Gerry over the Provisional Irish Republican Army pub bombings at Guildford and Woolwich, and helped secure an apology from former British prime minister Tony Blair in 2005 for their wrongful imprisonment.
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Each was sentenced to up to 14 years in jail, served their sentences, and with the exception of Giuseppe Sarah Conlon who died in 1980, released.
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Sarah Conlon won huge admiration in Ireland for her quiet dignity and refusal to feel bitterness.
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Father McKinley, a priest who noticed Sarah Conlon crying after the 1977 appeal was turned down, and others helped her begin a campaign to free her husband, son and other members of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven.
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Sarah Conlon took to lobbying dignitaries, church leaders and the media, in addition to writing to numerous Irish politicians, including the Social Democratic and Labour Party members of parliament Joe Hendron and John Hume, to ask for their support.
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Sarah Conlon's campaigning led to the start of the aforementioned inquiry, announced in 1989 by the home secretary Douglas Hurd, into the Guildford bomb cases, which led to Gerry's release.
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Sarah Conlon was described as a woman of "immense Catholic faith" who was protective of her son Gerry, and who held the family together with her hard work, wanting their life to be respectable, holy, and quiet.
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Sarah Conlon spent years working at a scrapyard sorting old clothes, and later worked long hours for low pay in the kitchens of the Royal Victoria Hospital, serving food to patients and mopping the floors.
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Sarah Conlon's husband, Patrick "Giuseppe", was a pacifist who evaded the draft during World War II.
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Sarah Conlon's condition was worsened by the humidity and condensation in the house, and he subsequently developed tuberculosis and emphysema.
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Sarah Conlon died of lung cancer in July 2008, aged 82.
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The film was adapted from Gerry Sarah Conlon's autobiography Proved Innocent, later published as In the Name of the Father.
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The 1990 made-for-television film Dear Sarah is based on the letters Giuseppe Conlon wrote to his wife while in prison.