‘Bring knickers and a toothbrush!’ Kelly Macdonald on making ‘a Sunderland Thelma and Louise’

. Audrey Amiss was the talented daughter of Sunderland shopkeepers who made a splash in the press by winning a place at the Royal Academy’s schools in London. In her final term, she was hospitalised for the first of many mental breakdowns, after which she disappeared for 30 years into a job as a shorthand typist in the civil service. But unknown to anyone except those who tried to care for her, Amiss never gave up on her art. “I was once in the tradition of social realism, also called the kitchen sink school of painting,” she wrote. “But I am now avant garde and misunderstood.”

Film-maker Carol Morley had never heard of Amiss until she was awarded a screenwriting fellowship at the Wellcome Foundation medical charity. “Somebody said, ‘We’ve got the archive of a woman who saved the wrappers of everything she ate every day.’” The Audrey Amiss collection, to which these wrappers belonged, had yet to be catalogued. “It was almost like a myth,” says Morley. “I was given two hours in a room with it – and I was there all day. I had to find out more.” Among the treasures she unearthed was Amiss’s passport, in which she described her occupation as: “Typist, Artist, Pirate, King.”

Those four words gave Morley the title of the riotously quirky road movie she went on to make. In it, we meet Amiss tenderly helping a beetle back on to its feet, as a mouse scuttles through all the rubbish littering her squalid flat. This idea arose from a phonecall Morley had with the actor who plays Amiss, Monica Dolan, whose murderous turn as Rose West in ITV’s Appropriate Adult won her a Bafta. Morley recalls: “Monica said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see Audrey doing some