A Poetic New Film Details The Life of Surrealist Painter Leonora Carrington

In Leonora in the Morning Light, Olivia Vinall plays the famously elusive artist, who rubbed shoulders with Breton and Dalí, fell for Max Ernst, and went on to match them all in talent and imagination

The British surrealist artist Leonora Carrington led a life defined by rebellion and propelled by her boundless curiosity and imagination. Born into a wealthy Roman Catholic family in 1917, she was, as a child, far more interested in the writings of Lewis Carroll, and the tales of Celtic mythology and Irish folklore told to her by her Irish nanny, than in behaving as a respectable young girl was expected to.

Over the years, Carrington was expelled from various Catholic schools for bad behaviour, discovered painting at boarding school in Florence, and finally persuaded her parents to let her study art at Amédée Ozenfant’s academy in London in 1936. A year later, the young debutante met and fell in love with the German surrealist Max Ernst, 26 years her senior. She ran away to Paris to be with him, soon rubbing shoulders with André Breton, Salvador Dalí et al, and expanding upon her own surrealist painting practice filled with mystical creatures, giant goddesses and animal-human hybrids.  

It is this chapter of the artist’s life that the new Carrington biopic, Leonora in the Morning Light, first focuses on, giving audiences a taste of Carrington’s non-conformist attitude as she scoffs at Breton’s assertion that women are the ultimate muse. Leonora Carrington is played by Olivia Vinall, who gives a magnetic performance, perfectly capturing the artist’s singular mix of acerbic no-nonsense and fierce creative spirit.

“I’m quite ashamed to say now that I had never heard of Leonora Carrington before,” Vinall tells AnOther, speaking via video call ahead of the film’s UK release. “But when I got the script and started to read more, I was completely hooked. I really felt connected to Carrington’s work. I think it’s the sense of the spiritual within it, and also her exploration of death – the closeness between being a woman and mortality – in this very dreamlike setting.”

Some further digging into Carrington’s past revealed strange connections between the artist’s life and Vinall’s own: they’d both attended the same boarding school, St Mary’s Ascot, for a brief period; and a jewel-toned painting showing a gathering of women and birds, which the actress had often walked by during her time as a student at the University of East Anglia without ever knowing the artist, turned out to be by Carrington herself. 

Vinall went to a casting with the film’s writers and directors, Lena Vurma and Thorsten Klein, and was so caught up in the audition that she walked away with the props she’d been given. “I stole these pencils that the other actors would’ve needed for the day – I really regretted that one,” she laughs. But the role, like the art supplies, was destined to be hers.

Adapted from Leonora, the 2011 biographical novel by Carrington’s friend, the Mexican author Elena Poniatowska, the film paints a fragmented and poetic picture of the artist’s life. It is sparse on dialogue and chronological storytelling, with more focus on place, emotion and fantastical interludes that reveal Carrington’s lifelong connection to animals (with whom she believed she could communicate) and ideas surrounding female mysticism.

For Vinall, shooting on location – at Carrington’s house in Saint-Martin d’Ardèche in the South of France, for instance, where she and Ernst lived out the first year of the Second World War, sculpting, painting and hosting their surrealist cohort; or at Las Pozas, Edward James’ extraordinary sculpture garden in a subtropical rainforest in Mexico, where the artist sought refuge after a period of ill mental health – was a key part of getting into character. “Being in the Ardèche, going to that house with all the sculptures around it; being in the places where Carrington created her work, and seeing and hearing the things that were surrounding her was more valuable than rehearsing, because Carrington’s spirit really permeated,” the actress recalls.

The role was a demanding one – Vinall, who had only ever painted a little at school, had to learn how to imitate the artist’s deft brushwork and paint-mixing techniques. “She could write backwards and forwards with both hands and swapped hands really frequently while painting, so those little touches felt really important to get right,” she notes.  

The actress also had to reenact Carrington’s deeply traumatic time spent at a psychiatric hospital in Santander – being subjected to electric shock therapy and fit-inducing medication – in the period after Ernst was arrested and interned as an enemy alien in France. “You feel torn about what you should and shouldn’t depict in someone’s life, and how to do that,” Vinall says of these visceral scenes, “but in [Carrington’s 1944 memoir] Down Below, she writes about never quite being able to get rid of the shadow of the pain and the proximity to death that she encountered in those sessions, so it brings something to understanding her art, particularly the art she goes on to create in Mexico, where she moved in 1942.”

The film never spells out such truths, however, rather leaving it to the audience to infer how different experiences and encounters – with Ernst or Carrington’s close friend and fellow surrealist Remedios Varo, for example; with Celtic myth and Mexican folk traditions – gave way to an artist who, until her death in Mexico City at the age of 94, “refused to answer people’s questions, so that they couldn’t label her and put her in a box.”

“She was an artist in the true sense, where you don’t have to define yourself or conform to any one else’s ideas,” concludes Vinall, reflecting on Carrington’s legacy as an internationally acclaimed artist who nevertheless remained fascinated by the world’s enigmas and fiercely protective of her own. “That sense of mystery is incredibly compelling, so I hope the film will encourage people to read her writing and sit with her painting, and make their own conclusions.”

Leonora in the Morning Light is in UK cinemas from May 29.