Ken Russell RIP

[Captain Oates]

With his commanding contribution to both television and cinema, Ken Russell's death should be greatly lamented. Obviously he had many critics as well, but we really won't see this kind of maverick talent again. So many of this TV films and cinema work were inspiring and memorable - there was no one remotely like him. Thank you Ken - Song Of Summer will never be bettered.

[Rowdon]

Just announced in the Guardian. Aged 84. No more details.
What a wealth of films he left behind. Much to explore and enjoy. RIP.

[Windthrop]

The death of Ken Russell has just been announced by his son. He was 84.

An absolute inconoclast.

[julian_craster]

This is very sad news indeed. He was one of the greats, who was really passionate about film - something that could only be said about a handful of British directors....



Ken Russell, the veteran director of Women in Love, The Devils and Tommy, has died at the age of 84

by Henry Barnes
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 November 2011



Ken Russell photographed earlier this year.


Ken Russell, the director behind the Oscar-winning Women in Love has died aged 84. Russell died on Sunday in his sleep, according to his friend, the arts writer Norman Lebrecht.

Known for a flamboyant style that was developed during his early career in television, Russell's films mixed high and low culture with unusual deftness and often courted controversy. The Devils … a religious drama that featured an infamous scene between Oliver Reed and Venessa Redgrave sexualising the crucifixion – was initially rejected by Warner Brothers. It will finally be released in its entirety in March next year, 42 years after it was made, when it will form part of the BFI's centenary celebrations.

Women in Love, released in 1969, became notorious for its nude male wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, while Tommy, his starry version of The Who's rock opera, was his biggest commercial success, beginning as a stage musical before being reimagined for the screen in 1976. But Russell fell out of the limelight in recent years, as some of his funding resources dried up and his proposed projects ever more eclectic. He returned to the public eye in 2007, when he appeared on the fifth edition of Celebrity Big Brother, before quitting the show after a disagreement with fellow contestant Jade Goody.

Russell was born in Southampton in 1927, the son of a shoe shop owner whose violent episodes led Russell and his mother to often seek refuge in the cinema. After serving in the RAF and merchant navy, Russell began his career as a photographer - a pursuit he maintained through his life - before moving into TV documentaries. He joined the BBC in 1959, where for the next 11 years he made pioneering arts documentaries for Monitor and Omnibus, the best-known of which focused on composers, including Elgar (1962), The Debussy Film (1965), Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967), Song of Summer (about Frederick Delius and Eric Fenby) (1968) and Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), a film about Richard Strauss, which Russell thought his finest achievement.

His first feature, a light comedy called French Dressing (1963), was not well-received, but he scored a minor hit 1967's Billion Dollar Brain, starring Michael Caine. Two years later came the success of Women in Love, Russell's groundbreaking adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel, which won an Oscar for leading lady Glenda Jackson, as well as nominations for cinematography, screenwriting and direction (Russell's only recognition by the Academy). The film established Russell's maverick credentials, not only for its full-frontal wrestling scene, but for an approach to the source that tallied perfectly with the sexual mores of the late 1960s.

He followed Women in Love with a string of innovative adult-themed films which were often as controversial as they were successful. The Music Lovers (1970), a biopic of Tchaikovsky, starred Richard Chamberlain as a flamboyant Tchaikovsky and Glenda Jackson as his wife. The score was conducted to great acclaim by André Previn. The film was widely panned but it was successful at the box office.

The 1970s were fruitful years for Russell, who made mature movies that proved popular at the box office, whatever their reception with the critics. Tchaikovsky biopic The Music Lovers (1970), scored by André Previn, was a lucrative reunion for Russell and Glenda Jackson, while The Devils, which reunited him with another Women in Love star, Oliver Reed, topped the British box office for eight weeks. But it was widely reviled in the press, with Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker famously damning the film as "monstrously indecent" in a TV encounter with Russell, leading the director to hit him with a rolled up copy of the Standard.

Twiggy vehicle The Boy Friend was followed by Savage Messiah, a biopic of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, then Mahler, an unlikely smash starring the young Robert Powell. Then came Tommy, followed by Lisztomania (1975), which also starred Roger Daltrey, then another biopic, 1977's Valentino.

Russell began the 1980s with more innovation: his first foray into science-fiction. Altered States was a hallucinatory fantasy that mixed religion and space to successful effect. Even critic Roger Ebert, who panned The Devils and the bulk of Russell's back catalogue, gave it his highest grade. But on set rows with the author of the novel on which Altered States was based, Paddy Chayefsky, led with Russell being socially exiled in Hollywood, and after one final US production - Crimes of Passion (1984) - Russell returned to Europe for good.

[Nick Dando]

From the BBC News site

BBC News - Ken Russell: A true British orginal

Nick

28 November 2011 Last updated at 09:40

Ken Russell: A true British original
Ken Russell was a larger than life character who was one of the most controversial directors in British cinema.
He specialised in the interpretation of the great classical composers, extravaganzas which matched powerful images with a dramatic score.
They were not for the faint-hearted. Audiences would be regaled with the sight of women cavorting naked in railway carriages, nude actors wresting in front of roaring fires and nuns indulging in orgies.
His critics dismissed the sensationalism as over indulgent silliness, but Russell believed they stimulated interest in his subjects.
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was born on 3 July 1927 in Southampton. His father was a prosperous shoe retailer who was given to outbursts of rage. The young Ken would often take refuge with his mother in local cinemas.

Musical obsession
He harboured a childhood ambition to be a ballet dancer but, instead, joined the Merchant Navy as a teenager.
On one occasion he was made to stand watch in the blazing sun for hours on end while crossing the Pacific. His lunatic captain feared an attack by Japanese midget submarines despite the war having ended.
A nervous breakdown ensued and, it was during his recovery that he first heard Tchaikovsky on the radio, inspiring a lifelong obsession with the classical composers.
After a spell in the Royal Air Force he became a photographer and first made amateur films while working for the magazine, Picture Post.
Music became his passion. Delius, Debussy, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Mahler and Liszt were among the composers given the Russell treatment.
As a result, he secured a job in the BBC arts department under Sir Huw Weldon who became a major influence on his career.
At the BBC, he developed an increasingly eccentric style, what the film critic David Thomson described as "an unbridled sense of pictorial madness and decay".
His documentary Song of Summer, about the composer Frederick Delius, and a study of Elgar were widely acclaimed, as was another documentary on the dancer, Isadora Duncan.

Naked wrestling
Elgar set new standards in documentary becoming one of the first to use actors to portray the composer rather than relying on documents and stills.
He was already causing outrage. Dance of the Seven Veils depicted Richard Strauss as a Nazi, causing fury amongst the composers family and led to the withdrawal of the rights to use the music, effectively banning future screenings.
In all, Ken Russell made three feature films and 33 drama-documentaries at the BBC.
His first successful film for the big screen was an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love in which he added the famous naked fireside wrestling match between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates.
"I managed to get them to do it by bribing them and encouraging them to enjoy themselves," he said later. "Judging by the smiles of satisfaction on their faces, they had the time of their lives."
The film won him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, for the first and only time in his career.

Devilishly outraged
United Artists were pleased with the result, though balked at his next proposal, which was to make a film about Tchaikovsky. Russell won them round with the pitch that it was about a nymphomaniac who falls in love with a homosexual.
The graphic nude sequences caused outrage, and it was widely panned by the critics. But it did well at the box office and Russell once described it as the film of which he was most proud.
"It was a masterpiece," he told the Daily Telegraph in 2010. "And I wouldn't change it in any way.
However, the critics outrage was as nothing compared to the reaction to his next work, The Devils, which featured the perverted goings-on amongst monks and nuns in medieval France.
Starring Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, it was a tale of demonic possession which unfolded against a background of explicit sex and and religious iconography
Even the kindest critics felt the visual grotesqueness had overpowered the film's narrative. The distributors, Warner Brothers, have always refused to release the full, uncut version.
However, it was recently announced that the film is to be made available for home consumption for the first time.
Russell's next step was from the ridiculous to the sublime; a film of the musical, The Boy Friend, starring the model Twiggy, who won two Golden Globes for her performance.
Excess returned with the 1974 film, Mahler, a biopic of the composer featuring nightmare flashbacks and surreal dream sequences.

Big Brother
Tommy, Pete Townsend's rock opera, was meat and drink to Ken Russell for the outrageous potential it offered him.
A star-studded cast, including Eric Clapton, Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson, played out their parts against a surreal background of child abuse, Marilyn Monroe worshippers and Tina Turner's dramatic Acid Queen.
The Who's Roger Daltrey played the title role and also featured in Russell's follow up film, Lisztomania, which portrayed the composer as a modern rock icon.
Russell's increasingly eccentric behaviour on set meant that, by the mid 1980s, the cinematic establishment had marginalised him.
He found it easier to work on opera and television for which he directed two more D.H. Lawrence works, The Rainbow and the series of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Two of his films from this period, Gothic and The Lair of the White Worm - starring a young Hugh Grant - were dismissed at the time but became cult viewing among fans of gothic horror.
In his seventies, he was reduced to shooting cheap movies in his garage for internet release; still as passionate, still as rebellious.
But, by now he had become something of a celebrity and, in 1995, the American Cinematheque put on a retrospective of his work and invited Russell to come and discuss his films with audiences and critics.
In 2007 he famously appeared in the Big Brother house on Channel 4 but left after an altercation with Jade Goody.
Ken Russell was married three times and had eight children but ended up living alone in a cottage in the New Forest.
He made the tabloid press when he advertised on the internet for the love of his life.
An American, Elise Tribble, who claimed that Russell's films had changed her life, answered his plea and came to live with him. But the relationship didn't last.
Critics often accused him of self-indulgence but behind all the flamboyant imagery was a film maker of great talent; some have said, genius.
Russell himself refused to compromise. "Reality is a dirty word for me, I know it isn't for most people, but I am not interested. There's too much of it about."

[dremble wedge]

A great talent. I think he had been unwell recently so it wasn't completely unexpected. Perhaps he'll now receive the acclaim that he never really got in life.

[wellendcanons]

He will be remembered for his outstanding contributions towards film.

A great talent gone.

Ken Russell.

wec

[julian_craster]

The Boy Friend (UK 1971) to be screened at NFT 1 London on Friday 9 December 2011 at 8.00PM, introduced by Barbara Windsor.

I hope this goes ahead as a trbute to Ken

[Rowdon]

I don't think it's sad exactly, because he was 84 and had spent his whole life doing what he wanted to do (with less money than he might have wanted, true). It's very sad for his family and friends of course, but that's a different matter.
Tommy knocked me out when I saw it (an AA film for my 14th birthday), because that's what he designed it to do; knock teenagers out. I loved Altered States too - a film which may well be best known to the youtube generation because of its reference in the classic A-ha video.
I remember the review of Quadrophenia in the NME saying "Thank God Ken Russell didn't get hold of it." - and while it's true that we would have lost a classic slice of Brit realism and grimy London sub-glamour, you can't help but wonder what he would have done with it.

A major player in British movies passes on, leaving a fascinating treasure trove of film behind him.

[didi-5]

Sad news. A unique talent.

[batman]

A truly unique and exciting director, sadly under-appreciated by many. RIP sir.

[wadsy]

Sad news indeed but 84 is a fine innings & what a life he led! R.I.P. Ken!

[harryfielder]

I'm shocked to read this today, I was lucky to work with Ken on a few films and loved his style...Never to be forgotten in my lifetime... Thank you for your work Ken, Now R.I.P....

Harry Fielder......(Aitch)

[Flare Players]

I met him once, briefly, and although I could barely get a sentence out, I was that much star struck, he was very softly spoken and patient with me and the other fanboys present...later he held court on what he considered wrong about modern British cinema and he was absolutely right....just as he was the only sane one in the Celebrity Big Brother house! RIP Ken Russell.

[julian_craster]

Ken Russell: a life in photographs.....

The Guardian:
Ken Russell: a life in photographs



Daily Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/c...-pictures.html

[Sgt Sunshine]

I'll always remember him for "Tommy"....



R.I.P...Ken

[jimw1]

Sad News..A Unigue film Maker ...R.I.P.

[moonfleet]

deleted deleted

[moonfleet]

R.I.P Ken Russell

Thank you so much for Women in Love

[Mr Sloane]

RIP - from the sublime to the ridiculous could have been coined just for him but the ridiculous could all be forgiven for the heights he also reached.