Donor in focus: Joan Morgan

Joan Morgan

Joan Morgan died in 2004, a few months short of her 100th birthday. She had been a leading actress in early British silent film, including six months in New York during WWI. Following the war, her father, Sidney Morgan, developed a film studio in Shoreham-on-Sea, and Joan starred in several films for him. Baulked of a Hollywood contract by her father's intervention, the young actress, still only in her early twenties, found the work drying up when the 'talkies' came in. She took up novel writing instead, as well as writing for stage and screen. She achieved some success in the 1930s with such titles as The Flag Lieutenant (Henry Edwards, 1932), but by the end of the 1950s she had left the film world behind. Her memories of a long-vanished, poorly documented era in British cinema were invaluable to film historians and she appeared in a video documentary by Paul Bernard in 1995, celebrating film-making in Sussex, as well as contributing to Cinema Europe: the other Hollywood (1995), a TV documentary directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill.