Women’s Work in British Film and Television

Joy Cuff
Matt painter and model-maker/sculptor

Cuff, Joy Matt painter and model-maker/sculptor for films

Also known by her unmarried name Joy Seddon.

Joy Cuff was born in Liverpool in 1944 and studied painting at Kingston School of Art, London in the early 1960s where she also took a course in television set design at Central St Martin’s. Her first commercial role in 1964 was as a sculptor for AP Films, working in the puppet workshop modelling puppet heads for the British television series Thunderbirds (1965/1966). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s she worked on a number of feature films made in British studios including 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968) and Hammer horrors such as Vengeance of She (1968). She designed title sequences for Ken Loach films, built miniature sets and painted numerous backgrounds for television commercials including the Venetian setting for Walls’ Cornetto ice-cream. In the 1980s she continued to provide design and camera-ready artwork for feature films, advertising companies and theatre. She is currently a volunteer at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication. In her recording Joy describes taking her portfolio around British film studios to get at start in the industry, the perception that some in the film industry had of art school trained women and the challenge of working alongside men on the set of 2001 at MGM. She discusses the wages she earned, her professional relationship with Bob Cuff and pleasure she took in seeing her name recorded in screen credits. She reflects on her own practice as a model-maker and painter including the materials she worked with (including plaster and clay) and her love of drawing. She also describes the excitement of live action television and fitting in work around caring for her two children.

©Melanie Bell

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Interview

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Women’s Work Oral Histories/Oral Histories/Melanie Bell, Women’s Work in British Film and Television, https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/bectu/Oral Histories,Friday 29th March 2024.
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