Ken Russell, a flamboyant film and opera director with a talent to entertain and provoke in equal measure, died at his home in the New Forest on November 27, 2011, after a long period of ill health, aged 84. According to his widow Lisi (his fourth wife), his last wish was for “a Viking funeral.” Long obituaries were published in every national newspaper.
Out of a total of more than 4,000 Old Pangbournians, Ken Russell has a fair claim to be both the most unusual and the most controversial. In the words of The Times obituary, “his parents made the misjudgement of sending him to the Nautical College, Pangbourne, where he fitted in no better than Jeffrey Bernard…his lower middle-class accent was mocked and he was bullied. But he did succeed in staging a drag show before he left called Thank Your Lucky Tars in which he impersonated his idol of the day, Dorothy Lamour.” Russell also began film-making at the NCP in between numerous illicit visits to cinemas in Reading. Reflecting this unhappy time, for the rest of his life he never passed up an opportunity to bad-mouth the College.
After the NCP Russell endured brief and unhappy stints in the Merchant Navy and the RAF in which he did his National Service. Later he won a ballet scholarship before becoming a press photographer and finally an amateur film-maker. Several of these movies caught the attention of Huw Wheldon, at the time the editor of the leading television arts programme Monitor, and led to a series of outstanding documentaries and biopics for the BBC. One of the films, Song of Summer about the relationship between the composer Delius and his amanuensis Eric Fenby, is consistently voted among the ten best documentaries ever produced on British television. In all, Russell made 35 films for the BBC over an 11-year period. “Russell should never have left the small screen,” argued the critic AA Gill in The Sunday Times after his death. “What he made for it is still radiant, romantic and radically high-minded.”
Russell, however, was never short of self-belief and ambition and during the 1960s branched out from the BBC into full length, commercial film-making. Several of his early efforts flopped until, in 1969, an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love hit the big screen and the big time. Glenda Jackson won her first Oscar as Best Actress for her role in this film while Oliver Reed and Alan Bates achieved lasting fame for their wrestling contest in front of an open fire, a scene that broke new ground in the cinema for the depiction of full-frontal male nudity. Two years later Russell followed this success with The Devils, a morally-ambiguous film set in 17th-century France which caused outraged reactions at the time but is regarded now as containing some of his most brilliant and audacious cinematic work. Then in 1975 came Tommy, an adaptation of a rock opera by The Who which proved to be the biggest hit of Russell's long career.
After Tommy Russell's film-making never regained the same commercial and critical heights. Expensive flops included Valentino in 1977 and The Rainbow a decade later. By the mid-1980s studios worldwide regarded him as “unbankable.” Russell made life more difficult for himself by an aggressive attitude to production companies, sponsors and above all critics. He loathed Hollywood, regarding the whole place as corrupt, and often picked fights with potential backers. For the remainder of his life he struggled to raise finance and complained loudly and bitterly of being neglected and indigent. He was never, however, idle and undertook a wide variety of activities in this period with varying degrees of success including winning an Emmy award for a television programme about British music in 1988, producing television commercials and making a disastrous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. In 1989 he published an autobiography A British Picture (reprinted in 2008) and later wrote a well-received weekly column on film in The Times from 2007-10.
Russell’s basic problem, reckoned The Times obituary, was that “he peaked too soon.” To The Daily Telegraph he was “a burly, unmistakable figure, and a bon vivant who favoured a bizarre range of anachronistic clothing…a mixture of exhibitionist and recluse.” For years he lived in splendid isolation in the Lake District. “Whether you loved or hated his work, Russell was an original,” The Guardian reflected in its obituary. He was always ready to be interviewed, highly quotable with a few pet subjects such as nuns and exerted a lasting influence on successive generations of young British film-makers. He also had an impish sense of humour and gave the impression that he cared not at all what others thought of him. Those who knew him well knew better. As The Guardian concluded: “Underneath all the showbiz bluster he was an old softie. Or, perhaps as accurately, a talented boy who never quite grew up.”