Profile: Ken Russell - A look back on the career of British cinema’s original sinner

Ken Russell, who has died aged 84, was a fiercely independent film director who tested the boundaries of cinema and courted controversy with censors, critics and public alike, writes Tim Cornwell

FORTY years after Ken Russell’s film The Devils opened in Edinburgh – which stars Vanessa Redgrave and includes graphic scenes of exorcism and torture in 17th century France – the original version is still considered too shocking, by the studio that owns it, for general release. Russell, whose death at 84 was announced yesterday, cut a swath through British cinema with a hugely original talent for making films which combined violence and sex with his passion for music and opera.

“He was fantastic,” says Jim Hickey, a former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, who brought Russell and his films, including Crimes of Passion, to the city in the 1980s. “He is one of the few people who went out on a limb and did things with British film that took it into the realms of fantasy and the most extraordinary image-making.”

Russell died peacefully on Sunday following a series of strokes. “He died with a smile on his face,” his son, Alex Verney-Elliott, said yesterday. Married four times, Russell is survived by his wife, Elize Tribble, and his children.

He will be remembered as a fiercely original director who delivered some mainstream films, but often took audiences and critics to the limit.

He may be best remembered for his 1969 film Women in Love, based on the book by DH Lawrence. One of his biggest hits, it earned Academy Award nominations for Russell and writer Larry Kramer, and a Best Actress Oscar for the star, Glenda Jackson. It also included one of the decade’s most unforgettable scenes – a nude wrestling bout between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed.

Jackson joined a chorus of tributes yesterday, saying it was a “privilege” to know Russell as both a film director and a friend. She said he had an “incredible visual genius”, “a passion” and “a third eye” when it came to film-making. “His contribution to cinema, not only in this country, but also internationally, will last. It’s an absolute shame that the British film industry has ignored him. He broke down barriers for so many people.”

Oliver Reed came to Edinburgh to promote The Devils in 1971, but neither Reed, nor The Scotsman writer, Allen Wright, could bring themselves to watch the entire film, Wright reported that year.

Film director Michael Winner said Russell should be best remembered for The Devils, but added: “What the censor took out of The Devils was almost as long as the rest of the movie. Russell was the most innovative director. His television work was in a field of its own, it was absolutely extraordinary.”

In 2010, the ailing Russell, now using a wheelchair, returned to Edinburgh for the screening of his 1972 film, Savage Messiah, part of a programme of his “lost and forgotten films”. Russell seemed to struggle during a question-and-answer session after the screening, but received a warm reception.

“He didn’t say a lot and was clearly not very well, but seeing an audience giving that film a standing ovation meant a lot to him,” says Hickey.

Russell was born in Southampton in 1927, and went to nautical college before joining the Merchant Navy at 17 as a junior crew member on a cargo ship bound for the Pacific. He hated naval life and was discharged after a nervous breakdown.

Desperate to avoid joining the family’s shoe business, he studied ballet and tried his hand at acting, before becoming a fashion photographer. He was then hired to work on BBC arts programmes, making profiles of the poet John Betjeman, comedian Spike Milligan and playwright Shelagh Delaney. “When there were no more live artists left, we turned to making somewhat longer films about dead artists such as Prokofiev,” Russell once said. From factual documentary accounts they moved to using real actors to impersonate historical figures in vivid dramas.

Music played a central role in many of Russell’s films, including The Music Lovers, which came to Edinburgh in 1970, and is a lurid telling of Tchaikovsky’s life, and Lisztomania, Russell’s 1975 film that starred Roger Daltrey of The Who as 19th-century heartthrob Franz Liszt.

The Boy Friend, a 1971 homage to 1930s Hollywood musicals starring supermodel Twiggy, and Russell’s 1975 adaptation of The Who’s psychedelic rock opera Tommy, were musicals of a different sort, but both marked by the director’s characteristic visual excess.

Twiggy said working with Russell on The Boy Friend changed her life. “He cast me in it when all the studios were saying, ‘You can’t cast her she’s a model,”’ she told the BBC. “And God bless his cotton socks, he fought for me.”

Russell’s darker side was rarely far away. Dante’s Inferno, a 1967 movie about the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, played up the differences between Rossetti’s idealised view of his wife and her reality as a drug addict.

His 1970 film, The Dance of the Seven Veils: A Comic Strip in Seven Episodes, presented the composer Richard Strauss as a crypto-Nazi, and showed him conducting Rosenkavalier waltzes while SS men tortured a Jew. The Devils, which starred Redgrave as a 17th-century nun in the grip of demonic possession, was heavily cut for its US release and this cut version is due to be released on DVD in Britain for the first time next year.

Gothic, a 1987 film about the genesis of Mary Shelley’s horror tale Frankenstein featured scenes of breasts with eyes and mouths spewing cockroaches. Russell, who described censorship as “ tedious and boring,” said his depiction of a drug-addled Percy Bysshe Shelley was an accurate depiction of the time.

“Everyone in England in the 19th century was on a permanent trip. He must have been stoned out of his mind for years,” Russell said. “I know I am.”

Russell’s fascination with changing mental states also surfaced in 1980 film Altered States, a rare Hollywood foray for him, starring William Hurt as a scientist experimenting with hallucinogens. Later films included the comic horror thriller The Lair of the White Worm in 1989, which gave an early role to Hugh Grant as a vampire-worm-battling lord of the manor.

Russell’s widow Elize said she was devastated by her husband’s death, which happened at their home in Lymington, Hampshire. She said: “It was completely unexpected, as he was doing what he loved.” He had been working on the script and casting for the movie Alice In Wonderland The Musical, which he was directing.