[3] Her playing of the second movement of Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto in the films Brief Encounter and The Seventh Veil (both 1945) helped popularise the work.

[4] She frequently claimed her birthday was 21 November in either 1910 or 1912,[5] but a search of Tasmanian birth registrations shows she was born on 1 January 1908.

[7] She attended St Joseph's Convent School in Boulder where she was taught music by Sister Mary Monica Butler.

However, they managed to find enough money to pay for piano lessons with a private teacher, Rosetta Spriggs (a great-grandpupil of Antonín Dvořák).

She made Eileen known to a visiting Trinity College examiner, Charles Schilsky, a former violinist with the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris.

Her playing has that melt of tone, that elasticity of expression that is, I find, typical of young Australian talents, and is so rare elsewhere [...].He suggested she would have the same celebrity as Teresa Carreño and Guiomar Novaes.

[4] Grainger recommended she study with an Australian master so that her playing would not become "Europeanised" or "Continentalised", and in his view Ernest Hutcheson, then teaching in New York, was the best choice.

[7] On 6 September 1930, she made her professional debut in London at a Henry Wood Promenade Concert, playing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No.

She was a frequent performer in Jack Hylton's "Blitz Tours" during the war,[12] and she appeared regularly at the National Gallery concerts organised by Dame Myra Hess.

[2][14] She also arranged her hair differently depending on the composer – up for Beethoven, falling free for Grieg and Debussy,[14] and drawn back for Mozart.

[8] Until 1940, she designed her own gowns, but in August she volunteered as a firewatcher, which revived her chronic rheumatism so, on the LPO tours, she had to wear a plaster cast encasing her shoulder and back.

She toured Australia in 1936, during which she was the soloist at the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra's first Celebrity Concert, conducted by William Cade.

[15] She toured in 1948, and performed the Grieg concerto at the gala opening concert of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, under Joseph Post.

In November 1948, Joyce broke the previous record of 17 appearances at London's Royal Albert Hall in a single calendar year.

In the 1950s, she also gave a series of concerts featuring four harpsichords, her colleagues including players such as George Malcolm, Thurston Dart, Denis Vaughan, Simon Preston, Raymond Leppard, Geoffrey Parsons and Valda Aveling.

She appeared as soloist at Sir Colin Davis's debut as a conductor, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO), on 22 September 1957, playing Tchaikovsky's Concerto No.

The work has parts for 12 toy instruments, which were taken by Joyce, Eric Coates, Thomas Armstrong, Astra Desmond, Gerard Hoffnung, Joseph Cooper, and other prominent people, all conducted by the composer.

In 1969, she appeared alongside fellow Australian pianist Geoffrey Parsons in a two-piano recital at Australia House, London.

[19] In August 1981, Eileen Joyce served on the jury of the 2nd Sydney International Piano Competition of Australia (SIPCA), alongside Rex Hobcroft, Cécile Ousset, Abbey Simon, Claude Frank, Gordon Watson, Roger Woodward and others.

In 1985, she conducted preliminary auditions in London for the 3rd SIPCA, and attended the competition in Sydney as Music Patron and deputy chairman of the jury.

On 8 April, she was cremated and her ashes were interred at St Peter's Anglican Church, Limpsfield, next to Sir Thomas Beecham.

[7] Arthur Bliss's music for the 1946 film Men of Two Worlds[22] (released in the US as Kisenga, Man of Africa, and re-released as Witch Doctor) includes a section for piano, male voices and orchestra, titled "Baraza", which Bliss said was "a conversation between an African Chief and his head men".

In 1947, her playing of Schubert's Impromptu in E-flat is heard in the segment "The Alien Corn" in the Dirk Bogarde film Quartet.

[7] She was also seen as herself in Trent's Last Case (1952), playing Mozart's C minor Concerto, K. 491 at the Royal Opera House with an orchestra under Anthony Collins.

[7] Prelude: The Early Life of Eileen Joyce by Lady Clare Hoskyns-Abrahall was a best-selling 1950 biography that was translated into several languages as well as Braille.

Stuart Challender conducted the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, with Bernadette Harvey-Balkus playing the first movement of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.

A bronze bust by Anna Mahler stands at the Eileen Joyce Studio at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

In the days of her greatest fame, the critical climate was still stuffy, and her mass appeal and her succession of different-coloured glamorous gowns, some designed by Norman Hartnell, provoked snobbish reaction and led to her being musically under-rated.

[1] Douglas Barratt served with the British Navy, and was killed on active service off Norway on 24 June 1942[35] when his ship HMS Gossamer was bombed and sunk.

[4] Joyce experienced considerable ill health throughout her adult years, particularly severe rheumatism in her shoulders, which at one time necessitated the wearing of a plaster cast, and she also suffered from sciatica.