Ken Russell: Sex, nuns and rock'n'roll

Glenda Jackson

I worked with Ken on six films. Women in Love was the first time I'd worked with a director of that genius, and on a film of that size. What I remember most was the creative and productive atmosphere on set: he was open to ideas from everyone, from the clapperboard operator upwards. Like any great director, he knew what he didn't want – but was open to everything else.

As a director he never said anything very specific. He'd say, "It needs to be a bit more … urrrgh, or a bit less hmmm", and you knew exactly what he meant. I used to ask him why he never said "Cut", and he said, "Because it means you always do something different." They gave me an Oscar [for her performance as Gudrun Brangwen], but I couldn't collect it as I was working. I haven't seen the film since the initial screening for cast and crew.

Working with Ken was one of the great joys of my life. My whole memory of him is infused with laughter. His imagination grew and developed over the course of the films we made together [The Music Lovers, The Boy Friend, Salome's Last Dance, The Rainbow, The Secret Life of Arnold Bax]. I think it's a great disgrace to the film industry that he has been ignored for so long, that people have not respected the barriers he broke down.

The last film I worked with him on was about the composer Arnold Bax, in which he played Bax. He was so frightened as a performer, very nervous. He cast himself in his films because nobody was giving him enough to do.

We were great friends, and I treasure that very much. We used to call him Cuddly Ken. He wasn't this wild director, merely out to shock and discomfort people. This idea that he was some kind of voyeur could not be further from the truth. He was passionately devoted to the screen, and passionate about social justice. Where did he stand politically? I wouldn't know: we never talked about it. But he was one of the two great directors in my life time – Ken, and in the theatre, Peter Brook. Without Ken, I would not have had my career.

Robert Powell

He was both extraordinary and impossible. He was always absolutely immersed in the world of the film he was working on, and he expected the same commitment of everyone: if he thought you weren't up to scratch, he would order you off the set.

With Ken, everything was immediate: he'd suddenly come up with an idea, and want to get on with it there and then. I loved working that way. He was also very trusting. When we worked on Mahler [the 1974 film in which Powell played the composer], we spent two and a half weeks filming in the Lake District, without being able to view the daily rushes. That meant we were working pretty much blind – but he trusted me, the other actors and the editor completely. The editor later said he was worried I wasn't sympathetic enough on screen; Ken kept that from me for a long time.

He could be immensely funny. He once told me that he'd been invited to address a drama school on the subject of film acting. "Why don't you come with me, Robert?" he said. "We'll take a stepladder, a bucket of water, a bucket of leaves and dirt and filth, and a wind machine. We'll put an actor on the ladder, and throw everything at them: then they'll understand how difficult it is." That made me laugh: in one scene in Mahler, I had been required to stand on a stepladder, with an electrician holding me up by keeping a large hand on my bottom.

Melvyn Bragg

I met Ken on [BBC arts programme] Monitor, where he was the star turn. He had just done Elgar, which had expanded people's appreciation of what an arts programme could do. It was bookended by two glorious shots: one of a boy riding a white horse across the Malvern Hills; another of men with bandages over their eyes, stumbling across the detritus of war, with Land of Hope and Glory playing in the background. It was shattering.

It was also an area of arts programming that hadn't been explored before, using fiction to make a documentary, and it caused a hell of a row. I was 24 when we worked together on Debussy, and it wasn't done to say: "This actor, Oliver Reed, will play Debussy." People said we were degrading expectations of what BBC documentaries should be.

Ken didn't go to university, but he knew more about film than anyone else. At Oxford, I'd been the film critic on the university newspaper; when I met him, Ken was this innocent Friar Tuck character who had seen every film ever made. Thank goodness Huw Wheldon gave him a job at Monitor. Ken scarcely spoke in those days; he was just waiting to get hold of a camera.

I wrote the screenplay for The Music Lovers, and we made a dozen or so documentaries for the South Bank Show. For the last 15 years of his life, I was his major commissioning editor. The critics had rather lost interest in him by then. He didn't get the backing of a Hollywood studio, or a British funding body, and so was slightly abandoned – a difficult place to be.

But he was fearless, eccentric and silly; I liked the first two and excused the last. Nobody else played with music and imagery the way he did; in Tommy, he cracked the rock world, and it's a very powerful piece of film-making. Ken didn't lack for boldness. I liked him a lot.

Vanessa Redgrave

He was a genius of cinema, an iconoclast. I am so proud that I played Sister Jeanne in The Devils for him. His brilliant choice of Derek Jarman as his set designer is a "for instance" of that genius. It's strange to think that the Vatican banned this film; it's also weird that in the UK we still had film and theatre censorship. I'll always remember Savage Messiah, and likewise The Music Lovers, with Glenda Jackson and an amazing script, photography and cast. He directed Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1992 for the BBC, and there were more than 15 million viewers. My daughter Joely Richardson played Lady Chatterley. We will both be for ever grateful to Ken for his thoughtful and loving obituary of our Natasha. She played Mary Shelley in Ken's Gothic. I hope the BBC will rerun the brilliant black-and-white films Ken directed about some of the world's famous composers; this would be a great and deserved tribute.

Peter Maxwell Davies

Ken was that very rare thing: a film director who actually loved, understood and respected music, and who took his relationship with a composer very seriously. I composed the music for two of his films: The Devils and The Boy Friend. Ken had heard my piece Eight Songs for a Mad King and liked it; the call asking me to work on The Devils came out of the blue. I had never done anything like it, and I will always be grateful to him for asking me.

His approach to film-making was very similar to that of a musician: his films evolved in long musical sentences, with moments of high tension followed by moments of relaxation. He certainly understood the importance of the score: I would sometimes say to him that I didn't feel a particular piece of music had been given enough time to breathe, and request another half-minute of footage. He would say, "Let me think about it," and then come back and say yes. That's almost unheard of.

He showed an irreverence for the lives of the great composers that sometimes came in for criticism. I believe his film about Strauss [Dance of the Seven Veils] – which featured a scene in which Hitler danced around with Strauss on his shoulders, playing the violin – had questions asked about it in parliament. But what I admired about Ken was that he always had immense confidence in his vision, even when it got him into trouble.

Douglas Hodge

He was capable of being both Vermeer and Benny Hill. With Women in Love – which I still think is one of the greatest British films of all time – he was the former: he had this wonderful, painterly eye. So when I was cast in one of his films - I played Lord Alfred Douglas and John the Baptist in [the 1988 film] Salome's Last Dance – I went with high expectations. Unfortunately, this was one of his Benny Hill phases. It might well be the worst film he ever made.

On my very first day on set, I was handed a leather string and told this was my entire costume. I was only 25, so I didn't complain. Nor did I complain when the makeup people told me that Ken wanted my entire body painted green. So they spent ages painting me, and then I went out into the freezing-cold lot, and Ken shouted: "Not that green!" All day I went back and forth between makeup and the set, until finally Ken was happy with the colour. By then everyone else had left, so I just put my clothes on and went home, thinking, "God, I've got to be back here getting painted green again at 5am."

I saw Ken a few more times after that; at the premiere of Salome, all the cinema ushers were topless. He was both sublime and ridiculous; both qualities lived in him simultaneously.

Don Boyd

In his later years, Ken was hugely marginalised by the film industry – they were afraid of him, I think. They shouldn't have been: he could be difficult, yes, but what great artist isn't? And he was incredibly collaborative, as I discovered when I worked with him.

Getting to work with Ken was a real watershed moment: I'd worshipped him from afar for years, ever since seeing his films about Elgar and Delius. The way he paired music and images was a revelation. When I saw him on TV being berated by [the Evening Standard film critic] Alexander Walker, and then standing up and hitting Walker over the head with a rolled-up copy of the Standard, I thought, "This is a man I love."

We eventually worked together on a couple of scripts that never came to fruition, and on Aria, a compilation-movie I made consisting of operatic pieces directed by some of the world's greatest directors. When he heard I was doing it, Ken called me up and asked to direct Nessun Dorma. I told him to go ahead, and he sent me a two-page handwritten letter explaining exactly how he would make the film. "I can't go ahead just with this," I said, but we did.

Ken was wonderful on set: methodical and committed. He never shouted at anyone, and he drank a glass of champagne at 6pm every day. Twenty-four hours after we'd finished shooting, he had the film edited and ready; every scene was exactly as he had described it in that two-page letter. He always knew exactly what he was doing; that was the source of his genius.