Ken Russell fought the BBC to let actors play Edward Elgar
Before Ken Russell, a television arts programme about a composer meant photographs and archive film. His 1962 Elgar for Monitor gave a whole episode to one figure and used actors in re-enactments, a battle he had to win against the BBC. It set up a career of flamboyant, provocative films about artists.
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was born in Southampton on 3 July 1927, the elder son of a shoeshop owner whose temper made home miserable. The boy escaped to the cinema with his mother, who was mentally ill, and later named Die Nibelungen and The Secret of the Loch as early influences. He dreamed of ballet but served as a teenager in the Royal Air Force and the Merchant Navy, where one captain kept him on watch for hours in Pacific sun, fearing Japanese midget submarines after the war was already over.
Photography came first. From 1954 he worked freelance, and his Teddy Girl pictures ran in Picture Post in June 1955. Short films followed, and the acclaim for Amelia and the Angel in 1959 earned him a BBC job directing arts documentaries for Monitor and Omnibus through 1970. The Debussy Film of 1965, scripted by Melvyn Bragg with Oliver Reed in the lead, was a critical hit, and Russell later called Song of Summer, his 1968 portrait of Frederick Delius and Eric Fenby, the best film he ever made.
Cinema was bumpier. His first feature, the comedy French Dressing in 1964, flopped, and a planned Clockwork Orange with the Rolling Stones died when the censors signalled disapproval. Billion Dollar Brain, a Harry Palmer thriller with Michael Caine, disappointed commercially. Then came Women in Love in 1969, adapted from D. H. Lawrence with a script by Larry Kramer. Glenda Jackson won her first Oscar, the film earned Russell his only Best Director nomination, and its nude wrestling scene broke a taboo on showing male nudity in mainstream film.
The Devils, Tommy with the Who and Altered States cemented his reputation for excess. In 2006 critic Mark Kermode credited him with proving British cinema could be as flamboyant as Fellini rather than stuck in kitchen-sink realism. Late in life he made cheap, experimental work such as The Lion's Mouth. He died on 27 November 2011.
Source: Ken Russell
