Carol Morley

Carol Morley is a British writer and director whose bold and distinctive body of work moves between documentary, drama and autobiography, often uncovering extraordinary stories hidden within seemingly ordinary lives.

Her breakthrough film, Dreams of a Life, pieced together the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a 38-year-old woman whose death in her North London flat went undiscovered for more than two years. Combining interviews, investigation and dramatic reconstruction, the film established Morley as a filmmaker with a particular fascination for memory, identity, absence and the lives that can disappear from view.

Her subsequent work includes The Falling, an atmospheric drama about a mysterious outbreak of fainting at a girls’ school in the late 1960s, and Out of Blue, an unconventional noir starring Patricia Clarkson. Across her films, Morley repeatedly returns to questions of female experience, the past and the sometimes unreliable ways in which we remember and understand ourselves.

In 2015, Carol was awarded the Wellcome Trust Screenwriting Fellowship in partnership with the BFI and Film4. During the fellowship she encountered the extraordinary archive of artist Audrey Amiss, whose paintings, diaries, letters and meticulous records became the inspiration for Morley’s Typist Artist Pirate King. Starring Monica Dolan, Kelly Macdonald and Gina McKee, the film transforms elements of Amiss’s life into an imagined road trip, bringing renewed attention to an artist who received little recognition during her lifetime.