In the film, the main character, Philippe Pozzo di Borgo is a widower. In reality, he was still married to his wife when he suffered the accident that left him in a wheelchair. She was a wealthy heiress and died 3 years after the incident. They adopted 2 children before she passed, but the children were also erased from the story. The ending of the film doesn’t match reality either. Philippe moved to Morocco where he found love again, a young Moroccan who was a single mother of 2 little girls. Finally, Abdel Yasmin Sellou, the ex-convict hired to take care of the aristocrat, is not originally from Senegal as the film depicts, he’s actually Algerian.