Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was a British film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style.
64 Facts About Ken Russell
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Ken Russell directed many feature films independently and for studios.
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Ken Russell is best known for his Oscar-winning film Women in Love, The Devils, The Who's Tommy, and the science fiction film Altered States.
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Ken Russell directed several films based on the lives of classical music composers, such as Elgar, Delius, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Liszt.
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Ken Russell was born in Southampton, Hampshire, England, on 3 July 1927, the elder of two sons of Ethel and Henry Ken Russell, a shoeshop owner.
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Ken Russell's father was distant and took out his rage on his family, so Russell spent much of his time at the cinema with his mother, who was mentally ill.
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Ken Russell cited the films Die Nibelungen and The Secret of the Loch as two early influences.
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Ken Russell was educated at private schools in Walthamstow and at Pangbourne College, and studied photography at Walthamstow Technical College.
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Ken Russell harboured a childhood ambition to be a ballet dancer but instead joined the Royal Air Force and the British Merchant Navy as a teenager.
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Ken Russell moved into television work after short careers in dance and photography.
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In 1954 Ken Russell started work as a local-interest freelance photographer.
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Ken Russell received a lot of acclaim for his short Amelia and the Angel, which helped secure him a job at the BBC.
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Between 1959 and 1970, Ken Russell directed arts documentaries for Monitor and Omnibus.
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Ken Russell's films began to get longer: Pop Goes the Easel and the much admired Elgar about Sir Edward Elgar.
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Ken Russell fought with the BBC over using actors to portray different ages of the same character, instead of the traditional photograph stills and documentary footage.
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Ken Russell had a noted critical success with the TV movie The Debussy Film starring Oliver Reed as Claude Debussy based on a script by Melvyn Bragg.
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Ken Russell made Don't Shoot the Composer, a documentary about composer Georges Delerue.
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Ken Russell did the highly praised Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World, about Isadora Duncan with Vivian Pickles.
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Ken Russell wanted to follow it with a biopic of Vaslav Nijinsky but Brain was a commercial disappointment.
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Ken Russell returned to television for Dante's Inferno with Reed as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Song of Summer about Frederick Delius and Eric Fenby.
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Ken Russell once said that the best film he ever made was Song of Summer, and that he would not edit a single shot.
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The colour schemes of Luciana Arrighi's art direction and Billy William's cinematography, which Ken Russell used for metaphorical effect, are often referred to by film textbooks.
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Ken Russell returned to television with Dance of the Seven Veils which sought to portray Richard Strauss as a Nazi: one scene in particular showed a Jewish man being tortured while a group of SS men look on in delight, with Strauss's music as the score.
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Ken Russell followed Women in Love with a string of innovative adult-themed films which were often as controversial as they were successful.
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Ken Russell followed it with The Devils, a film so provocative that the production company, Warner Bros.
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British film critic Alexander Walker described the film as "monstrously indecent" in a television confrontation with Ken Russell, leading the director to hit him with a rolled up copy of the Evening Standard, the newspaper for which Walker worked.
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Ken Russell followed The Devils with a reworking of the period musical The Boy Friend, for which he cast the model Twiggy, who won two Golden Globe Awards for her performance: one for Best Actress in a musical comedy, and one for the best newcomer.
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Ken Russell wanted to make Little Sparrow, a film about Edith Piaf, or a biopic of King Ludwig of Bavaria, but neither was made.
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Ken Russell announced a biopic of Sarah Bernhardt with Barbra Streisand but it was not made.
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Ken Russell worked with David Puttnam on Mahler starring Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler.
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In 1975, Ken Russell's 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.
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Two months before Tommy was released, Ken Russell started work on Lisztomania, another vehicle for Roger Daltrey, and for the film scoring of progressive rock keyboardist Rick Wakeman.
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Ken Russell returned to television with William and Dorothy a look at the life of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, about Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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Ken Russell went to Hollywood to make Altered States, a departure in both genre and tone, in that it is Ken Russell's only foray into science fiction.
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Ken Russell was attached to do the film of Evita for over a year, but ultimately left the project when he refused to cast Elaine Paige in the lead.
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However, Ken Russell found himself artistically rejuvenated when offered the chance to direct some opera.
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Ken Russell did successful productions of La boheme and Madama Butterfly.
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Ken Russell set up a company, Sitting Duck, to make music videos.
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Ken Russell directed a segment of Women and Men: Stories of Seduction and for TV did The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner.
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Ken Russell protested his film being given such a rating when Pretty Woman got an R, on the grounds that his film showed the real hardships of being a prostitute, and the other glorified it.
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Ken Russell became largely reliant on his own finances to continue making films.
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Ken Russell directed Lady Chatterley, The Mystery of Dr Martinu, a version of Treasure Island, Alice in Russialand, Mindbender, and an episode of Tales of Erotica.
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Ken Russell attended the festival and engaged in lengthy post-screening discussions of each film with audiences and moderator Martin Lewis, who had instigated and curated the retrospective.
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Ken Russell had a cameo in the 2006 film adaptation of Brian Aldiss's novel Brothers of the Head by the directors of Lost in La Mancha.
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Ken Russell had a cameo in the 2006 film Colour Me Kubrick.
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Ken Russell directed a segment for the horror anthology Trapped Ashes, which included segments directed by Sean S Cunningham, Monte Hellman, and Joe Dante.
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Ken Russell acted in "Final Cut", an episode of the BBC Television series Waking the Dead, playing the role of an aging director of a notorious 1960s crime drama similar to Performance.
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From 2004, Ken Russell was visiting professor at the University of Wales, Newport Film School.
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Ken Russell presented the Finest Film Awards in June 2005.
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Ken Russell was appointed visiting fellow at Southampton Solent University and later at the University of Southampton in April 2007, where he acted in a similar capacity to his role at the Newport Film School, until March 2008.
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Ken Russell's arrival was celebrated with a screening of the rare director's cut of The Devils hosted by Mark Kermode.
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Ken Russell began production of his first full-length film in almost five years, Moll Flanders, an adaptation of Daniel Defoe's novel, starring Lucinda Rhodes-Flaherty and Barry Humphries, but a finished film failed to materialise.
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In 2007, Ken Russell produced A Kitten for Hitler, a short film hosted by the Comedybox.
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Ken Russell then dared me to write a script that I thought should be banned.
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Ken Russell joined the cast of the British reality television show Celebrity Big Brother in January 2007, at the start of the series, but left voluntarily within a week after an altercation with fellow housemate Jade Goody.
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On 30 July 2010, for the opening night, Ken Russell was joined by Vanessa Redgrave for a 40th anniversary screening of The Devils and the next evening saw The Music Lovers and Women in Love projected with Ken Russell in attendance.
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Towards the end of his life, Ken Russell was planning a remake of the 1976 erotic musical comedy Alice in Wonderland.
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Ken Russell was married to Vivian Jolly from 1984 to 1991 ; the couple had a son and daughter.
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Ken Russell was married to the actress and former ballerina Hetty Baynes from 1992 to 1997; the couple had a son.
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Ken Russell married American actress and artist Elize "Lisi" Tribble in 2001, and the marriage lasted until his death.
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Ken Russell died on 27 November 2011 at the age of 84, having suffered a series of strokes; he was survived by his wife and eight children.
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Besides books on film-making and the British film industry, Russell wrote A British Picture: An Autobiography.
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An exhibition displaying some of Ken Russell's work was on display during the summer of 2007 in central London's Proud Galleries in The Strand, London.
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Ken Russell had directed Elton John's video for "Nikita" which featured a scene of John wearing the same boots he wore as the Pinball Wizard in the film adaptation of The Who's Tommy.