The life of Audrey Amiss, the Sunderland artistic genius who is finally being recognised, and features in new film Typist Artist Pirate King

The film is called Typist Artist Pirate King, which is what Audrey put as her occupation in her passport.

It is directed by Carol Morley and relates a fictionalised road trip by Audrey and her psychiatric nurse from her home in London back to Wearside. It was filmed in locations across Sunderland, including Seaburn and the East End, in November 2021.

The movie stars Monica Dolan as Audrey, with Kelly Macdonald as nurse Sandra and Gina McKee as Audrey's sister Dorothy. But who exactly was Audrey Amiss?

Life

Audrey Joan Amiss was born in Sunderland in 1933 to shopkeepers Arthur and Belle Amiss.

She was a pupil at Bede Grammar School for girls before studying at Sunderland School of Art (the building overlooking Backhouse Park). Her talent secured her a place at the prestigious Royal Academy Schools in London where she studied between 1954 and 1958.

But her artistic studies were never completed due to mental illness, which was less well understood in the 1950s.

The cliche about the fine line between genius and madness should generally be avoided. Yet it’s true that Audrey created art for most of her life, while being admitted to to psychiatric wards many times, right up to her death. Paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were among the diagnoses.

For the most part she accepted her mental health issues with humour. It’s difficult to tell if certain incidents in her life were attributable to her illness, or genuine eccentricity and a mischievous sense of fun.

According to a 2016 Guardian article by Carol Morley herself: “She wrote about a tour of China she took in the mid 1980s, describing how she wore a chairman Mao hat with origami hidden underneath, wilfully took over the tour bus commentary and, after running amok in a local village, found herself tied up in a Chinese asylum. ‘I didn’t blame them,’ she wrote, ‘I can be a bit much.’”

Director Morley was able to discover much about Amiss because the artist was a prodigious writer of diaries and letters; an average of eight per day to virtually any person or organisation who attracted her interest.

Morley says: “She wrote to the Sherlock Holmes Society about her missing sock.”

Upon discovering Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie on BBC 6 Music, she wrote: “I have decided that they must be some kind of off-beat psychiatrists… They help give relief to people under siege.”

Audrey trained as a shorthand typist for the Ministry of Labour from 1962, later working at a dole office – when her mental health permitted it. She spent 30 years in the Civil Service.

She lived in a Clapham maisonette for 50 years, 30 of which were with her mother Belle, who died in 1989. Audrey never married, never made any real money – and never lost her Mackem accent.

She died in Clapham in 2013 aged 79. On the last day of her life, she stuck down the packaging from a Cornetto and Sainsbury’s dessert in a scrapbook, which she used to document all the food she ate and items used. This is typical of the minute detail she kept of her life.

She left around 50,000 sketches in her sketchbooks alone. There was much more besides.

The work

Like LS Lowry, Audrey Amiss’ work is seeped in the everyday. She never forgot Sunderland and made at least one sketch of the Cat and Dog Steps at Roker on one of her visits back to Wearside.

Audrey described herself as “an artist, recording all my life the things I see around me”. Indeed she was. Her many, many subjects include street scenes, trips to the beach, London Zoo, nature, traffic, mundane objects, landscapes and people.

We are left to wonder how many people there are out there who are unaware that they are the subject of an original Amiss; be they at work, leisure or merely waiting for a bus.

An artist from her Wearside childhood, her earlier work tends to be oil, pastel or gouache. They are also more naturalistic and approachable than her later output, which veered towards the abstract.

Audrey’s style varied greatly though her life, but in whatever style, it often presented intimate thoughts. True to form, she dated and briefly explained almost all of her work.

Generally speaking, her later work becomes increasingly oblique; much of it drawn hastily. But it was her talent to do with as she wished.

While much of her creative output was never seen by anyone else during her lifetime, she did submit work for exhibitions, but became frustrated by the lack of recognition she received from the self-appointed “art world”.

She once said: “I’m avant-garde and misunderstood. They think I’m incompetent.”

Legacy

Members of Audrey’s family were astonished by the sheer volume of work they found in her flat after she died.

But how good was she? Was she a genius? You decide. It often takes a few decades for this to be decided; if ever. At the very least, she was possessed of a great creative talent and may become one of those artists whose work is only appreciated when they are long dead.

Audrey’s family donated the entirety of the work they found to the Wellcome Collection, a library and museum a few minutes walk from London’s King’s Cross Station, which focuses on human health and medicine.

Typist Artist Pirate King could be the first piece of the significant recognition this Sunderland woman was never afforded while she was still here.

At the very least, Audrey Amiss will be remembered as something more than a minor civil servant and eccentric.