FILM-MAKER KEN Russell, who died on Sunday aged 84, remained in love with movies up until the end, and had agreed to create a musical film version of Alice In Wonderland, a book usually regarded as unfilmable.
The final choice reflected much about Russell's life, following a career that included DH Lawrence's Women in Love in 1969, which was notorious for a scene where actors Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestled in the nude.
Even as a child, Russell wanted to go where he should not, standing outside cinemas in Southampton to persuade older filmgoers to take him into A-certificate productions when his parents refused to do so.
His parents though did buy him a film projector when he was 10. Russell went on to rent films from a local pharmacist, including a stock of pre-second World War Nazi film propaganda that had made its way, by routes unknown, to Southampton.
His parents had wanted him to run the family’s shoe shop, a thought that filled Russell with such horror that he opted for an unhappy stint with the Merchant Navy, and, subsequently, a less than successful career as a ballet dancer.
Russell, a man who could be difficult, inspired loyalty among many, including actress and MP, Glenda Jackson, who he helped to make an international star after he gave her a leading role in Women in Love.
“[It] was just wonderful to work with him and to work with him as often as I did. He created the kind of climate in which actors could do their job and I loved him dearly,” she told the BBC yesterday.
Almost all of his creations were controversial, a few were turkeys; though his 1968 film Song of Summer, which portrayed the desperate efforts of the blind and syphilitic composer Frederick Delius to finish his last piece, remains a masterpiece.
Russell’s life was never less than tumultuous: there were endless clashes with the British film censor, and ridicule for an unsuccessful opera production in London – and his cottage in Hampshire burned down in 2007.
His most famous clash, with film companies and the censor, was over his 1971 film The Devils. It was based on Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, which featured scenes of nuns masturbating before the Cross.
The film, which starred both Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave, will finally become available on DVD next year, and, despite the passage of four decades, scenes will have been deleted and an X-rated certificate placed on it.
By the end, the money was gone, or nearly so, though he had already started work on the script and casting for a musical of Alice In Wonderland,before his final illness.
Announcing his death yesterday, his son from one of his four marriages, Alex Verney-Elliott, said he had died in hospital on Sunday following a series of strokes: “My father died peacefully, he died with a smile on his face.”
