The Real-Life Amnesia Case That Inspired 50 First Dates

When the 2004 romantic comedy 50 First Dates (streaming now on Peacock) begins, there isn’t much redeeming about Adam Sandler’s Henry Roth. He’s a freewheeling womanizer who spends his days treating animals at Sea Life Park Hawaii (which is admittedly pretty cute) and his nights hooking up with tourists. He gives them a whirlwind romance a week or two at a time before sending them on their way and moving on to the next.

His only real ambition is a research trip on his sailboat, but it’s a piece of garbage hung together with chewing gum and duct tape, which is how he ends up stranded just offshore of a local diner. Inside, he has a meet cute with Lucy (Drew Barrymore) over the nostalgic smell of fish, the mysterious lives of walruses, and the art of waffle architecture.

Lucy is a creature of routine, not by choice but because she relives the same day over and over, courtesy of a traumatic brain injury a year earlier. She goes to the same diner everyday because that’s where she ate breakfast on Sundays (the day of her injury) and she reads a copy of the same newspaper, laid out by her dad every evening.

Every day she paints a mural for her dad’s birthday and every night he paints over it, giving her a clean canvas for the next day’s birthday mural. It’s a visual representation of what’s going on inside Lucy’s mind. Every night her memory is erased while she sleeps and she wakes up with a clean psychic slate.

The Real-Life Inspiration Behind 50 First Dates

An automobile accident featuring a stray cow damaged Lucy’s temporal lobe, impairing her ability to convert memories into long-term storage. While some of the details of Lucy’s ailment were fictionalized, they were inspired by the real-life story of Michelle Philpots, resident of Lincolnshire, England. Philpots endured two catastrophic car accidents in 1985 and 1990. The double dose of head trauma evolved over the next four years into increasingly severe seizures and forgetfulness.

Eventually, Philpots lost her job after photocopying the same document over and over again, not realizing she had already done it. Ultimately, she lost the ability to form any new memories at all. She wakes up every morning thinking it's 1994. An operation in 2005 helped to almost entirely eliminate the seizures, but Philpots’ memory remains a whiteboard in perpetual erasure.

This kind of anterograde amnesia is “reasonably rare but it does exist,” neuroscientist Dr. Peter Nestor told The Daily Mail. “You are capable of carrying out day-to-day things and don't forget how to do certain things like speaking. But if someone was to ask you what you did yesterday, you wouldn't have a clue.”

In the film, Lucy’s father and brother spend their days making sure she never finds out what happened, keeping her in a perpetual time loop where she is happy, but nothing ever changes. It doesn’t always work, and it isn’t a workable solution long-term, so Harry starts brainstorming. Harry gives Lucy a tape catching her up on what she’s missed and explaining the accident. Combined with a journal recounting her life in first person, Lucy finds a way to navigate the world.

Unlike Lucy and Harry, Philpots and her husband were together before she lost her memory, but he still has to trot out the wedding album to prove they’ve been married for the last few decades. Her husband helps to keep her anchored in the present by filling in the gaps in her memory with his own, and for everything else she uses sticky notes and smartphone reminders. Those notes fill the same role as Lucy’s tape and diary.

Cases like Philpots and the fictional Lucy highlight how much there still is to learn about the formation and storage of memories. They also highlight how humans sometimes step up with a mixture of compassion and creativity to carve new paths through the world for the people they love.

Watch 50 First Dates streaming now on Peacock!