Margy Kinmonth
Born and bred in Norland’s Ladbroke Road, the film director Margy Kinmonth has gone on to make over 40 award winning films. She is currently directing one about the British war artist Eric Ravilious, for his 80th Anniversary. She made time to speak to Norland Noticeboard before heading to the south coast to do more filming.
During lockdown Margy’s filming was stopped while waiting for her team to be able to work on the film again, so during all three lockdowns and in between she has been recording the pandemic year’s unfolding events in watercolour, in a drawing book given to her by her daughter. She has become a lockdown painter. It started with paintings of people queueing at Notting Hill Gate. “It was like 1984,” she says, “People were beginning to wear masks and everything being closed. A bit like [French impressionist] Seurat’s paintings, with everyone social distancing.”
Margy still lives in the area, just off Ladbroke Grove. “It has been interesting to see the changes,” she says, "When I was a child, from my bedroom window I could see the church at the top of the hill and hear the factory hooter. We would never go too far up Ladbroke Grove (70 Ladbroke Grove was the limit) as it was considered dangerous. In the 70s cars were burnt.” We are sitting at St John’s Cafe, and when she was young Margy sang in the St John’s church choir along with the late politician Tony Benn's family and Georgina von Eztdorf. It was an exciting time in Notting Hill, Margy moved into a house in Elgin Crescent previously rented by new wave musician Adam Ant, and Island Records had turned a church in Basing Street off Portobello Road into a recording studio. Bob Marley, Van Morrison and the Beatles hung out in local bars.
Queuing at Notting Hill Gate farmers market
At the time Margy wanted to be a war photographer and had dramatic photo coverage of her neighbour’s Elgin Crescent house on fire on the front page of the Kensington Post. She was working at the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road as a projectionist and found that she was “already obsessed with making films”. She also worked as projectionist at 20th Century Fox and Studio1 on Oxford Street while studying painting at the academic Byam Shaw School of Art, a beautiful building in Campden Street which now contains ubiquitous luxury flats.
After a stint welding huge sculptures at Bath Academy of Art, she entered the world of film making via television adverts. She then moved to Granada TV in Manchester to research, write and direct current affairs programmes and then worked as a freelance director for BBC, ITV and MTV. Among her many accolades, Margy won the 1991 BAFTA Best Documentary Series for Naked Hollywood.
Currently Margy is directing art and culture documentaries for Foxtrot Films, an independent film and television company she co-founded 1981, and which she now owns with the film producer Maureen Murray. foxtrotfilms Recent films include Royal Paintbox, which reveals rarely seen artworks by members of the Royal Family and interviews with HRH the Prince of Wales, BAFTA-nominated War Art with Eddie Redmayne, and Hermitage Revealed, a behind the scenes look at one of the largest and oldest museums in the world.
