THE daughter of music mogul Paul McGuinness is to make a film about the daughter of literary giant James Joyce. Alexandra McGuinness will direct and co-write the screenplay with the Northern Irish actress Antonia Campbell-Hughes.
Lucia will tell the story of Lucia Joyce, only daughter of the Ulysses author.
Lucia was a great dancer who spent the vast majority of her life in mental asylums. She briefly dated the playwright Samuel Beckett and was a patient of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.
A 2003 book about Lucia, by Carol Loeb Shloss, was the subject of legal challenges by the James Joyce estate. However, copyright expired on Joyce’s work in 2012, meaning that such projects are now free to be made without objections from the family.
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Alexandra McGuinness is a former actress who now writes and directs her own films. She and Campbell-Hughes worked together on Lotus Eaters, McGuinness’s 2011 feature debut in which the Derry actress played the lead role. Campbell-Hughes has previously played Lucia Joyce in Imagining Ulysses, a 2004 documentary for RTE.
Lucia is still in the early stages of scriptwriting but has secured the backing of the Irish Film Board with a €12,000 development grant. Conor Barry, a producer on the project, said the initial plan for Lucia had been to concentrate on her time in Paris, before she went into a mental hospital, and some of the time after that.
“What is amazing is that there are graphic novels, plays and biographies about her and still not a lot of people know about Lucia Joyce. It was just brought to my attention. I never knew the extent of Lucia Joyce’s story until Alexandra and Antonia brought it to me,” said Barry, who recently produced You’re Ugly Too.
Lucia was the author’s second child with Nora Barnacle, after his son Giorgio. She was born in Italy and later moved to Paris with the family. She studied dance and was said to be particularly close to her father.
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She began psychiatry sessions with Jung in 1934 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
A year later, she was placed in a mental institution outside Paris. She remained there throughout the Second World War while the rest of her family moved to central France.
Her father died in 1941 and 10 years later she was moved to a hospital in England where she had few visitors. She remained there until her death in 1982 at the age of 75. Much has been made of Lucia’s relationship with Beckett. The pair met in Paris when the young playwright came to see her father and eventually acted as his assistant. It is believed James Joyce was the real draw for Beckett, and not his daughter. Lucia took the end of their relationship badly and some scholars blame the break-up for her mental decline.
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Beckett later burnt all his letters from Lucia at the request of Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s grandson and Lucia’s nephew. However, Beckett does mention her in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, former head of the National Gallery of Ireland.
He references a visit his friend Maria has made to Lucia in the hospital: “[Maria] told me that [Lucia’s doctor] said to her one day that he had hopes for Lucia as long as I continued to visit her, but none any more when I ceased going.”
Barry said McGuinness and Campbell-Hughes had been aware of Lucia Joyce for many years and had been planning a film for some time.
McGuinness, who does not discuss her family connection in interviews, started out acting with small parts in PS I Love You and RTE’s The Clinic, before enrolling for an MA in film-making at the London Film School. Lotus Eaters, a tale of hedonism among London’s wealthy youth, is her only feature film to date but she has completed three shorts.
As well as Shloss’s biography, Lucia Joyce has been the subject of a recent graphic novel entitled Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes and a 2004 West End play entitled Calico written by Michael Hastings.