The British director Ken Russell has died in his sleep at the age of 84. He had suffered a series of strokes in recent years.
The possessor of an unbridled visual imagination, Russell was responsible for some of the most flamboyant and outrageous films of the '60s and '70s, including "Women in Love" (1969), "The Music Lovers" (1970), "The Devils" (1971), "Savage Messiah" (1972), "Tommy" (1975), and "Listzomania" (1975). As an ageing enfant terrible, he continued to shock audiences and provoke critics in the late summer of his career, making "Crimes of Passion" (1984), "Gothic" (1986), the hyperbolic cult horror classic "Lair of the White Worm" (1988), and "Whore" (1991). "Crimes of Passion" and "Whore," both deliberately sleazy films, angrily critique the commercial objectification and exploitation of women in America — though they partake of it, too.
Russell was born in Southampton in 1927, and as a child sought escape in the movies from his abusive father. After serving with the Merchant Navy and the Royal Air Force, he trained as a ballet dancer for five years but was told he wouldn’t make the grade. He subsequently worked as a photographer for the magazine Picture Post and made prizewinning amateur films that brought him to the BBC. He directed prolifically for the arts programmes "Monitor" and "Omnibus," in many ways the most fruitfully inventive period of his career.
Attempting to make high culture accessible through his sensationalistic approach, Russell specialized in increasingly fanciful biopics of classical music composers. Over the course of his 50 years as a filmmaker, he tackled Elgar, Debussy, Bartok, Delius, Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Lizst, Mahler, and Arnold Bax, as well as the dancer Isadora Duncan, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and the painter Henri Rousseau. "Dance of the Seven Veils" (1970), his violent, comic-strip Strauss film portrays the composer as a Nazi and has long been suppressed.
Restraint was foreign to Russell, which is why some of the most frequent epithets hurled at him included “vulgar,” “tasteless,” “trite,” “camp,” “cruel,” and “misogynistic.” He had Oliver Reed’s Gerald Crich brutally raping Glenda Jackson’s Gudrun Brangwen and Crich nude-wrestling with Alan Bates’s Rupert Birkin in "Women in Love." He had Helen Mirren’s dilettante, as stark naked as a Rubens, ostentatiously walking down a staircase in "Savage Messiah." He had Ann-Margret writhing in a sea of baked beans in "Tommy" (his film of the Who’s rock opera). In "Gothic," his feverish account of the night Mary Shelley conceived "Frankenstein," he replaced the nipples of Lord Byron’s mistress with eyes and paraded a medieval knight with an armor casing over his huge erection. Excessive Russell’s films may have been, but they were never dull.
Most notorious of all was "The Devils." Based on an Aldous Huxley novel and a John Whiting play, it grotesquely depicts the fate of the Catholic priest Urbain Grandier (Reed), whose control of a fortified town is an irritant to Richelieu in plague-ridden 17th-century France. Grandier’s spurning of the deformed nun, Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), who is sexually obsessed with him, causes her to denounce him as a warlock and all hell breaks loose. Russell’s original version contained an orgy in which possessed nuns hysterically rape a statue of Christ and the specter of Jeanne masturbating with Grandier’s charred femur after he is burned at the stake. Russell was forced to remove these scenes to get the film past the censors, but it was released with an “X” certificate in Britain and America (where it was further depleted) — and widely vilified. Believed lost, the cut scenes have been found and restored, and the full version of "The Devils" will be released on DVD in the UK for the first time in March.
Less aesthetically morbid than his other works, Russell’s adaptations of D.H. Lawrence’s novels — "Women in Love," "The Rainbow" (1989), and the genuinely sexy four-part miniseries "Lady Chatterley" (1993) — served the author’s primitivist philosophy well. He was at his best on "Clouds of Glory," the pair of seldom-seen 1978 television films he made on the Lake Poets: the pastoral "William and Dorothy," about the Wordsworths, and the more extravagantly symbolic "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his addiction to opium.
"Valentino" (1977), Russell’s biopic of the silent star Rudolph Valentino, enfolded a swingeing attack on the movie capital’s mores. Ever a maker of excessive images, he had his greatest American success with the 1980 science-fiction movie "Altered States," though his fights with Paddy Chayefsky, the author of the source novel, led to him being ostracized by the movie capital. He mustered, though, for "The Russian House" (1990), starring Sean Connery, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Russell himself.
Russell’s main subjects were artistic passion and sexual freedom. Though not a political filmmaker (and the opposite of a politically correct one), he consistently attacked hypocrisy and prejudice in his films. "Mahler" (1974) and "Prisoner of Honor" (1991), a television film about the Dreyfus Affair, both address anti-Semitism.
Russell was married five times. He had four sons and daughter with his first wife, the costume designer Shirley Ann Russell, and a son with his third wife, the actress Hetty Baynes.