The story of a woman whose remains were not discovered in her bedsit for more than two years after she died has been turned into a dramatic silver screen documentary.
News of the death of 38-year-old Joyce Vincent in her Wood Green home gripped the nation when it was found she had sat undiscovered on her sofa, surrounded by Christmas presents she had been wrapping, for 26 months.
The television was still on when housing officials made the gruesome discovery after breaking in to repossess the Sky City flat above The Mall in Wood Green High Road in January 2006.
Joyce had to be identified through dental records, and an inquest failed to determine exactly how she died.
The questions left on filmmaker Carol Morley’s lips were how she had slipped through the net, how come nobody missed her enough to try to find her?
Speaking just a stone’s throw from where Joyce died after a special preview screening at Cineworld in Wood Green last week, Mrs Morley said: “Joyce’s legacy would have been The Sun headline and then bloggers treating Joyce like she was an urban myth – people were writing [things like], ‘Must have been one miserable bitch because nobody noticed’. I thought, ‘I can’t let that happen’.”
Over five years, the film’s director worked to uncover Joyce’s real story – appealing for information via newspaper ads, the internet and even a poster on the side of a black cab.
Amazingly, she managed to assemble a variety of Joyce’s former friends, work colleagues and boyfriends to relive their memories of Joyce in front of the camera and to try to shed light on how she came to meet such a tragic end. The result, Dreams Of A Life, is in cinemas now.
She said: “When I began the story, I didn’t know who Joyce was at all and she might have been somebody that didn’t know anybody.
“But it turned out that in her life she’d really had a profound effect on people – I mean, people talk about her lighting up a room. She was so far away from [The Sun’s] headline.”
Prior to her death, Joyce had been a successful professional, working in the treasury department at Ernst & Young, one of the biggest accountancy firms in the world.
She spent some time in a Wood Green women’s refuge after suffering domestic abuse, and Mrs Morley revealed she had cut herself off from her family, who had employed a private detective to try and track her down, without success.
Interspersed with the interviews, which include views from the Journal’s former news editor and chief reporter, the film uses dramatisations of Joyce’s earlier life and imagined moments in the lead-up to her death – all played by promising young actress Zawe Ashton.
hornsey journal
