EXCLUSIVE
TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING Carol Morley’s affecting, art-flavoured road movie…
When Carol Morley (Out of Blue) was awarded a Wellcome screenwriting fellowship in 2016, she soon found the subject for her next film. ‘I was told of someone who had collected the wrappers of everything they ate, and I thought, “That’s my kind of story,”’ she smiles, recalling how she dug through 80 boxes containing 50,000 sketches, letters and diaries.
This was the archived belongings of Audrey Amiss, gifted to the Wellcome charity by Audrey’s nephew and niece when she died in 2013. It evidenced an extraordinary life: born in 1933, Audrey showed an early talent for art and attended the Sunderland School of Art before winning a place at the prestigious Royal Academy Schools in London. In her final term, she experienced a breakdown and wound up in a psychiatric hospital. Audrey didn’t return to her studies, but instead spent 30 years as a typist in the civil service. She was admitted to psychiatric wards on dozens of occasions, her diagnoses including bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia.
‘I was the first person to look at [the archived material], and I became obsessed,’ says Morley. ‘I would dream of Audrey. I met the family and friends and colleagues, and was hunting people down.’
Rather than make a straight documentary, Morley decided on a fictionalised road movie (Amiss was an intrepid traveller), with Audrey (Monica Dolan) conning her social worker (Kelly Macdonald) into driving her from London to Sunderland so she might exhibit her art in a gallery. En route, memories stir and trauma is unpacked, and a family reunion/reckoning beckons.
In its piecing together of an invisi
