Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell, known as Ken Russell (born July 3, 1927), is a controversial English film director, particularly known for his films about famous composers.
Early career
Russell was born in Southampton, and was educated in Walthamstow and at Pangbourne College. He served in both the Royal Air Force and the Merchant Navy, and moved into television work after short careers in dance and photography.
His series of documentary Teddy Girl photographs were published in Picture Post magazine in the summer of 1955, and he continued to work as a freelance documentary photographer until 1959. After 1959, Russell’s amateur films (his documentaries for the Free Cinema movement, and his 1958 short Amelia and the Angel) secured him a job at the BBC, where he worked regularly from 1959 to 1970 making arts documentaries for Monitor and Omnibus. Amongst his best-known works from this period were Elgar (1962), The Debussy Film (1965), Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967), and Song of Summer (1968). His television films became increasingly flamboyant and outrageous: The Debussy Film opens with a scene in which a woman is shot full of arrows (a reference to Debussy’s The Martyrdom of St Sebastian); while Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), a self-styled “comic strip in seven parts on the life of Richard Strauss”, caused such outrage that questions were asked in the British Parliament, and the Strauss family withdrew all music rights, effectively banning it from legal circulation. Although the majority of his BBC films were about musical subjects, he also tackled visual art in the seminal film on British Pop Art Pop Goes the Easel (1963), and in Always on Sunday (1965), a biopic of French painter Henri Rousseau.
Russell’s first feature film was French Dressing (1963), a comedy loosely based on Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman; its critical and commercial failure sent Russell back to the BBC. His second big-screen effort was part of author Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer spy cycle, Billion-Dollar Brain (1967).
The 60s were perhaps the director’s artistically richest decade. Russell has stated that his 1968 Omnibus production of the life of composer Frederick Delius, the aforementioned Song of Summer, starring Max Adrian, was his best film.[1]
1970s and controversy
Ken Russell’s 1969 film Women in Love, based on the novel by D. H. Lawrence had won an Oscar for Glenda Jackson and broke the cinema taboo on full frontal male nudity. More importantly, it was the third biggest money-maker of the year in the UK, and it put Ken Russell on a path of box-office success without equal in the British cinema. He followed Women in Love with a string of innovatory adult themed films which were often as controversial as they were successful. In the 1970s he had five No.1 hits at the British box office; more than any other filmmaker; and he spent more weeks at No. 1 than any filmmaker with the single exception of Guy Hamilton (who directed three James Bond films in the decade). Russell’s first No.1 hit of the 1970s was The Music Lovers (1970), a biopic of Tchaikovsky which was unusual in that it used the composer’s music to tell the story of the musician’s life. The score was conducted to great acclaim by Andre Previn. The tragedy of Tchiakovsky was that he has was a homosexual living in a country which prohibited homosexuality. The following year, Russell released The Devils, a film so powerful that its backers, the American company, Warner Brothers still refuse to release it uncut. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun and using material from John Whiting’s play of the same source, it starred Oliver Reed as a noble priest who stands in the way of a corrupt church and state. In America, the film which had already been cut for distribution in Britain (where it topped the box-office for eight weeks) was further censored. It has never played in anything like its original state in America.
Russell followed it up with a spectacular reworking of the period musical The Boy Friend , for which he cast the supermodel Twiggy, who won two Golden Globe awards for her performance in the film; one for Best Actress in a comedy of musical; and one for the best newcomer. The film was heavily cut, shorn of two musical numbers, for its American release, where understandably it was not a big success. It continues to play in its original form in cinemas across Europe. Russell himself provided most of the financing for Savage Messiah, a biopic of the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and he provided the producer David Puttnam with a rare box-office hit with Mahler, a film which helped to make Robert Powell a household name. In 1975, Russell achieved a hit of astonishing proportions. His star-studded film version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy starring Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Elton John, Tina Turner, Eric Clapton, and Jack Nicholson, spent a record fourteen weeks at the No.1 spot and played to full houses for over a year. Two months before Tommy was released (in March 1975), Russell started work on Lisztomania (1975), a vehicle for Roger Daltrey, and for the virtuoso film scoring of Rick Wakeman. One of Russell’s aims with the film was to show that there is good music (inspirational) and bad music. The good music of Liszt is stolen by Wagner who, in his operas, puts forward the theme of the Superman; a philosophy and a music that brought forth Hitler (a similar theme was expressed in Russell’s banned 1970 TV film, Dance of the Seven Veils). In Lisztomania, Daltrey as Liszt, must slay the Monster that is Wagner, played by Paul Nicholas. Tommy and Lisztomania were important in the rise of improved motion picture sound in the 1970s, as they were among the first films to be released with Dolby-encoded soundtracks. The involvement of these two Russell films in this pioneering work can be attributed in part to his special interest in music and to his location in the United Kingdom, where development work on Dolby film sound was centered. Lisztomania topped the British box-office for two weeks in November 1975, when Tommy was still in the list of the week’s top five box-office hits. The film’s finale, Liszt returning from Heaven in a spaceship fired by the energies of the dead women in his life, to gun down the monstrous Wagner, is one of the most astonishingly imaginative finales in all cinema. Russell’s next film, the 1977 biopic Valentino also topped the British box-office for two weeks, but was not a hit in America, where mainstream films continuing frontal adult nudity are frowned upon.
1980s
Russell’s 1980 effort Altered States was a departure in both genre and tone, in that it is Russell’s only foray into serious science fiction, and contains comparatively few elements of satire and caricature. Working from Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay (based upon a novel of the same name), Russell used his penchant for elaborate visual effects to translate Chayefsky’s hallucinatory story to the cinema, and took the opportunity to add his trademark religious and sexual imagery. The film was also noteworthy for having one of the most inventive, complex, sonically polished, and powerful soundtracks created for a film up to that time, including an Oscar-nominated score by John Corigliano, best known as a classic music composer. The film enjoyed moderate financial success, scored with critics who had otherwise dismissed Russell’s work, and has come to be regarded as a classic “head film”. Regrettably, one of the film’s greatest detractors was Paddy Chayefsky himself, who dropped out of the project shortly after filming began, and requested prior to the film’s release that his name be replaced by the name “Sidney Aaron” (actually his own birth name).
Russell’s last American film was Crimes of Passion (1984); it returns to his major themes of sex and religion, contrasting the prostitute China Blue (played by Kathleen Turner) with a spurious street preacher (played by Anthony Perkins).
Unable to comply with the artistic conservatism of Hollywood, Russell returned to Europe, finding financing mostly with various independent and fly-by-night companies. Gothic (1986) was a typically hysterical treatment of Lord Byron and the creation of the story that became Frankenstein.
In 1988 Russell released two films: the Hammer spoof The Lair of the White Worm, and Salome’s Last Dance, the latter reuniting him with his Women in Love star Glenda Jackson. Worm, which often plays like self-parody, was accepted in many quarters as a trashy lark, while Salome received grudging praise. Russell then returned to D.H. Lawrence for what so far has been his last personal project for the cinema, an adaptation of The Rainbow, released in 1989.
In 1989, Russell directed the music video for the band Pandora’s Box’s song “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”.
1990s
In the 1990 film The Russia House, starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, Russell made one of his first significant acting appearances, portraying Walter, an ambiguously gay British intelligence officer who discomfits his more strait-laced CIA counterparts.
By the early 1990s, Russell’s notoriety and persona had attracted so much media attention that he had come to be widely regarded as nearly unemployable in the cinema. He is now largely reliant on his own finances to continue making films. Much of his work since 1990 has been commissioned for television, and he has contributed regularly to The South Bank Show. Prisoner of Honor (1991) was Russell’s final work with Oliver Reed; Mindbender (1996) was dismissed as propaganda for mentalist Uri Geller ; Tracked (aka Dogboys) (1998) was unrecognizable as a Russell film. Efforts such as The Lion’s Mouth (2000) and Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002) have suffered from low production values (for example, being shot on video on Russell’s estate, and often featuring Russell himself) and limited distribution.
Russell has written books on filmmaking and on the British film industry; a brilliant and witty 1989 autobiography entitled A British Picture: An Autobiography (published in the United States as Altered States: The Autobiography of Ken Russell); and books for young readers.
2000s
Russell has a cameo in the upcoming mockumentary “Brothers of the Head” by the directors of “Lost in La Mancha”, scheduled for a summer 2006 release. He also has a cameo in the 2006 “Colour Me Kubrick”. He directed a segment for the horror anthology “Trapped Ashes” (2007) which also includes segments directed by Sean S. Cunningham, Monte Hellman, and Joe Dante. He is currently in pre-production for two films: The Pearl of the Orient and Kings X.
He is also a visiting professor of the University of Wales, Newport Film School (as of 2004). One of his many tasks is to advise students on the making of their graduate films. He also presented the Finest Film Awards (for graduate filmmakers of Newport) in June 2005.
Courtesy Of Wikipedia
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