TRAVEL DOCUMENT

TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING Carol Morley’s affecting, art-flavoured road movie…

‘Don’t worry Audrey, the gulls got my chips as well as your ice cream’

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 invisible life, Typist Artist Pirate King (the title is how Audrey listed her occupation on her passport) acts as a companion piece to Morley’s compassionate 2011 docudrama Dreams of a Life. ‘The projects were so different because Joyce [Vincent, whose body was discovered in her London bedsit three years after she died] left absolutely nothing behind – the contents of her flat were destroyed for contamination. And then Audrey left so much behind. But it felt that both were unknown women who have a lot to say. So it feels like this act of revival and resurrection.’

‘It feels like this act of revival and resurrection’

CAROL MORLEY

Morley wrestled over whether she was doing the right thing in making the film, but ultimately decided ‘Audrey made her work for people to see it. She wanted her exhibition. So it felt right.’ And when you’ve seen the film, you can now look at Wellcome’s Audrey Amiss Archive online, or book to see it in its physical glory. One goal remains: ‘It’s not locked in yet, but hopefully, from this, there will be an exhibition of Audrey’s work in Sunderland.’

TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 27 OCTOBER.