The story of Maria Snoeys-Lagler’s photo album is not new, but it recently resurfaced on TikTok, contested by those who were unaware of its origins with accusations of image manipulation using artificial intelligence. This is not the case. This case dates back to 2020, when employees of a consignment store in Mortsel, Belgium, discovered a mysterious photo album.
On February 12, 2020, on its Facebook page, the Opnieu & Co second-hand store published a sort of call for testimonies after a stranger dropped off a photo album in the store’s donation box. The cover features an old-fashioned floral pattern and the many pages each contain two photos in the classic 10×15 cm format. But instead of finding souvenirs of vacations, weddings or births, the second-hand dealers discovered portraits of Hollywood stars. Bruce Willis, Angelina Jolie, Will Smith, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts, Johnny Depp… They are all young, smiling and posed alongside a little lady with blow-dried hair and seventies-style clothes.
La « Hollywood Foreign Press Association »
There it is, the mystery: who is this perfect anonymous person to whom the photo album probably belongs? “We think that this could have been shared by accident and we are therefore looking for the owner of this book,” the managers of the flea market launched as an appeal on Facebook. The kind of quest that Internet users love and that quickly bears fruit. The answer was in fact right before the eyes of the discoverers, in the form of a name badge worn by the unknown person in one of the photos. A badge that reveals the name of the little lady, Maria Snoeys-Lagler, and which bears the words “Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA)”.
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Several Belgian media outlets picked up the case and managed to trace Maria’s story. Originally from the Antwerp region, she had moved to Los Angeles with her husband John in the 1950s. He was then a Hollywood correspondent for the Belgian newspaper There remembers Guy Mortier, former editor-in-chief of the magazine. And the journalist recounts that when her husband died in the 1970s, Maria took up the torch and joined the prestigious HFPA association that organizes the Golden Globes. An accreditation that gives “access to the big Hollywood studios and therefore to the stars of big series and movies,” explains Guy Mortier in an article published on There in February 2020.
Maria’s daughter found in Los Angeles
Anonymous in Belgium, Maria made a place for herself among the Hollywood elite. “Courageous” and “friendly”, she “even quickly became responsible for the foreign press in Los Angeles, and as such, she also had access everywhere”, continues the former editor-in-chief. And at each Golden Globe ceremony she attended, Maria took her best selfies backstage with the big names in American cinema.
After a life and a photo album full of life, Maria died in 2016, at the age of 93, six years after having stopped her activity as a correspondent in Hollywood. In 2020, the Belgian media VTM Nieuws found the trace of Maria’s daughter, Rita, who still lives in Los Angeles and knows nothing about this story of photo album. The managers of Opnieu & Co then decided to return Rita’s inheritance from her mother. One mystery remains, however: by whom and why did the precious album end up in the second-hand shops?
