Ken Russell, who has died aged 84, was so often called rude names – the wild man of British cinema, the apostle of excess, the oldest angry young man in the business – that he gave up denying it all quite early in his career. Indeed, he often seemed to court the very publicity that emphasised only the crudest assessment of his work. He gave the impression that he cared not a damn. Those who knew him better, however, knew that he did. Underneath all the showbiz bluster, he was an old softie. Or, perhaps as accurately, a talented boy who never quite grew up.
It has, of course, to be said that he was capable of almost any enormity in the careless rapture he brought to making his films. He could be dreadfully cruel to his undoubted talent, almost as if he was defying himself, let alone those who supported him. The truth was that, when he deliberately reined himself in, as he did in 1989 with an adaptation of DH Lawrence's The Rainbow (as a sop to financiers who thought he was too much of a risk), he could be rather dull.
That he regarded as an almost mortal sin. "Wake 'em up" was generally his watchword, and it was certainly true that you could seldom go to sleep in a Russell film. If you did, you had nightmares. Sex loomed large in many of them since he felt it was the mainspring of most things, and generally covered or tidied up by latterday English hypocrisy. Though he was undoubtedly no advocate of the proverbial British good taste, once exemplified in the cinema by beautifully suppressed emotion and clipped middle-class accents, he was never quite the strange and hairy monster determined to scandalise the bourgeoisie or, at the very least, to exemplify everything that's foreign to the steadier British temperament.
He was much more like one of the last of the great British romantics, whose roster included Michael Powell. Much of Powell's work also attempted to cut through the conventional treatments of controversial subject matter and expose the often boiling passions underneath. For this, Powell was frequently attacked – Peeping Tom being so badly mauled that it almost ruined his career. So was Russell, and most would say with better reason. Regularly set upon as vulgar, crude and deliberately shocking, he was never best friends with the British film critics. He once called me, after a favourable review, "the best of a very bad lot".
That was praise indeed. But when you look at films such as Song of Summer (1968), about the composer Frederick Delius, blind and syphilitic, attempting to complete his last works with the aid of his fellow composer Eric Fenby, you see a side of Russell that it would be difficult not to cherish. It is one of the very best films about a composer and his work.
The film was based on Fenby's memoir Delius As I Knew Him and co-scripted by Fenby and Russell. Russell seemed to understand Delius and his muse so perfectly that what you hear and what you see are completely indivisible. It is a daring, beautifully performed film with an impish sense of humour that remains deeply moving. It was finally shown in the cinema in 2001, at the Telluride festival, in Colorado, where he received a standing ovation.
Russell was born in Southampton to Ethel and Henry, a shoe-shop owner. He was educated at Pangbourne naval college and studied photography at Walthamstow art school. He pursued life merrily and drank with what one might call a certain not always discreet dedication. After time in the merchant navy (in 1945) and the RAF (1946-49), he tried life as a ballet dancer and was a freelance photographer before arriving at the BBC, where Delius was one of a series of musical films that he made, including studies of Sergei Prokofiev, Béla Bartók, Edward Elgar, Arnold Bax, Claude Debussy and, most controversially of all, his anti-Richard Strauss diatribe Dance of the Seven Veils. He also made a 1966 film about the dancer Isadora Duncan and Dante's Inferno (1967), which examined the life and work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
He was not the only film-maker encouraged by Huw Wheldon, who steered the Monitor series, but he was probably the one who had the most arguments with him. At first, Wheldon refused to allow Russell or anybody else to make a film about an artist with an actor actually playing him. But gradually he relented, allowing Russell, in particular, a freer hand than most. Watched by millions, the series of films set a standard for arts television that has never been beaten or, some would say, even equalled.
Led by the success, and sometimes the notoriety, of these films, Russell progressed into the cinema. In 1963 he made an underrated offbeat comedy, French Dressing, and, four years later, a thriller, Billion Dollar Brain, taken from Len Deighton's novel and starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer. His first real commercial success came in 1969 with his version of Lawrence's Women in Love. Its fireside nude wrestling scene with Oliver Reed and Alan Bates jolted a good many, including apparently the actors themselves and a nervous censor, but the film brought Russell an Oscar nomination and made him a director to be reckoned with. Hollywood took note, but it was a long time before he took note of them. After the freedom Wheldon had given him, he was not best pleased by the relatively uncultured suits he found on visits to the west coast.
There followed a stream of films: The Music Lovers (1970), a swingeing account of the gay composer Tchaikovsky's marriage and death, which starred Richard Chamberlain in the lead role and certainly helped his co-star Glenda Jackson into worldwide prominence; The Devils (1971), an interpretation of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun that contained some of Russell's most brilliant and audaciously cinematic work but was cut by Ted Ashley of Warner Bros, who didn't like such things as nuns masturbating at representations of Christ on the cross; The Boy Friend (1971), a musical based on Sandy Wilson's successful stage production and paying homage not just to Wilson but also to the choreographer Busby Berkeley; Savage Messiah (1972), about the tempestuous life of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; and Mahler (1974), a fictionalised biography starring Robert Powell as a very neurotic composer. Many of these were criticised for factual inaccuracies, but the point of most of them was that Russell intended them to be psychological fantasias rather than biographies.
During this time, Russell became not only the most controversial British director but also the first in the history of British film to have three films playing first-run engagements in London simultaneously - The Music Lovers,The Devils and The Boy Friend. But his reputation as a kind of unruly cinematic anarchist, capable of frightening even the horses and doubtless making some of his subjects swivel in their graves, tended to cloud the formidable technique he brought to everything he did. In most of them there were some extraordinary passages. It might have been better if there had been a few more ordinary ones as well.
Tommy (1975), an engaging version of the Who's slightly dotty rock opera, was followed by two of his less successful freeform biographies, Lisztomania (1975), starring the Who's Roger Daltrey, and Valentino (1977), starring Rudolf Nureyev. The almost psychedelic Altered States (1980), based on a novel and a (disowned) screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, was Russell's first Hollywood picture. In 1984 his Crimes of Passion was an extremely uninhibited essay on American sexual dreams and nightmares starring Kathleen Turner as the prostitute China Blue. Yet Russell hated Hollywood, regarding the whole place as deeply corrupt and horribly predicated towards the kind of timidity and compromise he abhorred.
I remember putting on Gothic in 1986 as the finale of the London film festival. Set at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva and featuring Byron, Shelley and Mary Godwin in the weird events which led up to the writing of Frankenstein, it was, surprisingly, the first Russell film ever shown at the festival. When it was over, I went with Russell towards the final-night party. We were instantly refused entrance by the heavies at the door. "But I'm the director of the festival," I said, "and this is Ken Russell." Ken was much amused when one of them said: "Go on, tell us another one. I'll let you in, but not him."
Gothic was not particularly vintage Russell, though it certainly had its moments. It was an illustration of his talent both to entertain and provoke, to delve into the psyches of fellow artists and to show us, in particular, that the biopic doesn't have to be safely anodyne, undemanding in technique or heavily compromised by speaking to a largely ignorant audience.
After the 1991 film Whore, Russell directed often for television, including another Lawrence adaptation, Lady Chatterley (1993), starring Joely Richardson and Sean Bean. There is hardly a film Russell made that has not caused critics to fulminate against him, sometimes with justice, and hardly one that doesn't have its supporters. One of his staunchest allies, perhaps surprisingly, was Stan Brakhage, the experimental American film-maker whose work was in a different world from Russell's, but who frequently showed his films to students as object lessons in effective audacity.
Whether you loved or hated his work, Russell was an original. And not quite the "shrill, screaming gossip" Pauline Kael called him. He once wrote an article entitled The Films I Do Best Are About the People I Believe In. And he made a television programme called Ken Russell's ABC of British Music (1988) which proved that point absolutely. It won an Emmy for best performing arts programme. Look at that film and at Song of Summer and the Elgar film and you have the best of Russell on television. Look at The Devils and Crimes of Passion – and the first quickfire 20 minutes of Tommy – and you have just about the best of him in the cinema.
Russell's autobiography, A British Picture, was published in 1989. A new edition came out in 2008, shortly after he had lost his cottage in the New Forest to a fire and had appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. He had lost most of his money over the years but never his sense of humour. When he wanted an email address and was told that it couldn't be plain "Kenrussell", he asked for and got "Thekenrussell".
He was married four times: in 1956 to Shirley Kingdom, with whom he had five children; in 1983 to Vivian Jolly, with whom he had two children; in 1992 to Hetty Baynes, with whom he had one son; and in 2001, to Elise Tribble. Elise followed an appeal on Russell's own website which had engendered a dozen answers: "Unbankable film director Ken Russell seeks soulmate. Must be mad about music, movies and Moet & Chandon champagne."
He is survived by Elise and his children.
Ken Russell, film director, born 3 July 1927; died 27 November 2011
