Eileen Joyce - Work in Film

Work in Film

With her partner Christopher Mann's influence, Eileen Joyce contributed to the soundtracks of a number of films. She is best known as the soloist in Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, used to great effect in David Lean's film Brief Encounter (1945).

She also provided the playing for the piano music in the 1945 film The Seventh Veil, but this was uncredited in the film. This music again included the Rachmaninoff 2nd Concerto, and also Grieg's Concerto in A minor; as well as solo pieces by Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven (the slow movement of the Pathétique Sonata assumed a particular importance in the film).

She appeared in Battle for Music, a 1945 docu-drama about the struggles of the London Philharmonic Orchestra during the war, in which a number of prominent composers and performers appeared as themselves.

Arthur Bliss’s music for the 1946 film Men of Two Worlds (released in the USA as Kisenga, Man of Africa, and re-released as Witch Doctor) includes a section for piano, male voices and orchestra, titled "Baraza", which Bliss said was "a conversation between an African Chief and his head men". Eileen Joyce played this for the film, with Muir Mathieson conducting. Bliss also wrote this out as a stand-alone concert piece, which Eileen Joyce both premiered in 1945 and recorded in 1946. This recording was more favourably received than the film was.

She was in the 1946 British film A Girl in a Million, in which she plays a part of Franck's Symphonic Variations. In 1947, her playing of Schubert's Impromptu in E flat is heard in the segment "The Alien Corn" in the Dirk Bogarde film Quartet. She was also seen as herself in Trent's Last Case (1952), playing Mozart's C minor Concerto, K. 491 at the Royal Opera House with an orchestra under Anthony Collins.

Prelude: The Early Life of Eileen Joyce by Lady Clare Hoskyns-Abrahall was a best-selling 1950 biography that was translated into several languages as well as Braille. While it told the main elements of her story, it was in places ludicrously fictionalised. It was dramatised for radio in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Africa, Norway and Sweden. Wherever She Goes was a 1951 black-and-white feature film based on the book, directed by Michael Gordon. It was shot on location in Australia. Eileen Joyce's character was played by Suzanne Parrett (in the only film she ever made), and Parrett's performance double was Pamela Page. Eileen Joyce briefly appears as herself at the start and end of the film, playing the Grieg concerto. The film was much less successful than the book on which it was based, although it was one of the very few Australian films made before 1970 to be given a (limited) release in New York.