After a film career full of wild drama, gaudy conflagrations and operatic flourishes, the director Ken Russell died quietly in hospital on Sunday afternoon at the age of 84, after suffering a series of strokes. – effecting a quiet, discreet exit from the comfort of his hospital bed. "My father died peacefully," said his son Alex Verney-Elliott. "He died with a smile on his face."
Known for his flamboyant, often outrageous brand of film-making, Russell made movies that juggled high and low culture with glee and invariably courted controversy. His 1969 breakthrough, the Oscar-winning Women in Love, electrified audiences with its infamous nude wrestling scene, while 1971's The Devils – a torrid brew of sex, violence and Catholicism – found itself banned across Italy and was initially rejected by its backer, Warner Bros. His other notable films include Altered States, The Boy Friend and Tommy, his exuberant big-screen overhaul of the Who's rock opera.
Born in Southampton, the son of a shoemaker, Russell served in the RAF and merchant navy before forging a career in photography. He joined the BBC in 1959 where he won plaudits for his ambitious, idiosyncratic arts documentaries on the likes of Elgar, Debussy and Isadora Duncan. His 1970 TV film Dance of the Seven Veils depicted Richard Strauss as a Nazi and featured a scene in which a group of Jews are shown being tortured to the sound of a Strauss composition. The Strauss family were enraged and promptly withdrew the music rights. Russell, with typical chutzpah, claimed it was the best thing he ever made.
Russell made his feature debut with the flop 1963 comedy French Dressing before finding his feet with the 1967 spy thriller Billion Dollar Brain, starring Michael Caine. He was Oscar-nominated for directing Women in Love and scored a significant box office hit the following year with The Music Lovers, a biopic of Tchaikovsky with a score by André Previn. The Devils sat atop the UK box office chart for eight weeks, scandalising the masses with its tale of lusty priests and demented nuns in 17th-century France. Alexander Walker, film critic at the Evening Standard, damned the movie as "monstrously indecent", prompting Russell to attack him with a rolled-up copy of his own newspaper. "I wish it had been an iron bar," the director would later remark.
In the wake of the director's death, the reviews were altogether more positive.
"I think of Ken Russell with great love and affection," said Glenda Jackson who won the best actress Oscar for her role in Women in Love. "His contribution to cinema, not only in this country but internationally, will last."
"He pushed the boundaries of British cinema to its limits in both comedy and serious drama," said Amanda Donohue, who worked with Russell on The Rainbow and The Lair of the White Worm. "His work was unique, vibrant and provocative. A maverick, one of a kind.I will always remember him and smile."
Russell's career stuttered following the release of the cult 1980 drama Altered States, which starred William Hurt as a renegade scientist although he continued to direct, in film and on TV, throughout the 1980s and 90s. In later years he taught in film schools, and staged an off-Broadway play and produced a number of short films. His appetite for both adventure and publicity appeared undiminished when he reared up on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. He lasted four days inside the house before making a boisterous exit after an altercation with fellow contestant Jade Goody. "I don't want to live in a society riddled with evil and hatred," he explained in a statement. Russell spent his declining years in leafy exile in the New Forest, the self-styled "forgotten man of British film". His lack of productivity suggests that he was seen as too risky and eccentric to gamble a budget on. But the director never quite went away. He was always clamouring for a return to the stage. At one stage he wanted to make a multi-million-pound version of Moll Flanders, shot in Croatia, with Barry Humphries starring. At others he was variously reported to be writing a biopic of Jesus Christ and a fresh adaptation of Peter Pan. "I find myself identifying a great deal with JM Barrie," he explained. "He never grew up, never lost his innocence or his sense of wonder and that's something to be cherished. I've still a lot of that inside me, too."
