KEN (KENNETH ALFRED) RUSSELL. Born in Southampton, Hampshire, U.K. 3 July 1927. Attended Pangbourne Nautical College, 1941-44; Walthamstow Art School; International Ballet School. Married 1) Shirley Ann Kingdon in 1957 (divorced 1978); five children; 2) Vivian Jolly in 1984; children: Molly and Rupert. Served in Merchant Navy, 1945, and Royal Air Force, 1946-49. After military service, worked as a dancer, with the Ny Norsk Ballet, 1950, as an actor, with the Garrick Players, 1951, and as a photographer, 1951-57, before developing skills as amateur film director; joined BBC as documentary film-maker, 1958-66; debut as professional film director, 1963; established reputation on television with series of biographical films about great composers for the arts programmes Omnibus, from 1966, and the South Bank Show, from 1983; recognized as film director of international stature with Women in Love, 1969; as freelance film director since 1966 he has continued to provoke controversy with films for both television and the cinema, also staging opera and directing pop videos. Recipient: Screen Writers' Guild Award, 1962, 1965, 1966, 1967; Guild of Television Producers and Directors Award, 1966; Desmond Davis Award, 1968; Emmy Award, 1988. Address: Peter Rawley International Creative Management, 8899 Beverly Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA 90048-2412, U.S.

TELEVISION SERIES

1993 Lady Chatterley Television Documentaries
1959 Poet's London
1959 Gordon Jacob
1959 Variations on a Mechanical Theme
1959 Robert McBryde and Robert Colquhoun
1959 Portrait of a Goon
1960 Marie Rambert Remembers
1960 Architecture of Entertainment
1960 Cranks at Work
1960 The Miners' Picnic
1960 Shelagh Delaney's Salford
1960 A House in Bayswater
1960 The Light Fantastic
1961 Old Battersea House
1961 Portrait of a Soviet Composer
1961 London Moods
1961 Antonio Gaudi
1962 Pop Goes the Easel
1962 Preservation Man
1962 Mr Chesher's Traction Engines
1962 Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill
1962 Elgar
1963 Watch the Birdie
1964 Lonely Shore
1964 Bartok
1964 The Dotty World of James Lloyd
1964 Diary of a Nobody
1965 The Debussy Film
1965 Always on Sunday
1966 Don't Shoot the Composer
1966 Isadora Duncan, The Biggest Dancer in the World 1967 Dante's Inferno
1968 A Song of Summer
1970 The Dance of the Seven Veils
1978 Clouds of Glory, Parts I and II
1983 Ken Russell's View of the Planets
1984 Elgar
1984 Vaughan Williams
1988 Ken Russell's ABC of British Music
1989 Ken Russell--A British Picture
1990 Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner
1992 The Secret Life of Arnold Bax
1995 Classic Widows

FILMS  (director)

Amelia and the Angel, 1957; Peep Show, 1958; Lourdes, 1958; French Dressing, 1963; Billion Dollar Brain, 1967; Women in Love, 1969; The Music Lovers, 1970 (also producer); The Devils, 1971 (also writer and co-producer); The Boy Friend (also writer and producer), 1971; The Savage Messiah, 1972 (also producer); Mahler, 1974 (also writer); Tommy, 1974 (also writer and co-producer); Lisztomania, 1975 (also writer); Valentino, 1977 (also co-writer); Altered States, 1980; Crimes of Passion, 1984; Gothic, 1986; Aria, 1987 (episode); Salomé's Last Dance, 1988; The Lair of the White Worm, 1988; The Rainbow, 1989; Whore, 1991.

FILMS   (actor)

The Russia House, 1991.

STAGE (operas)

The Rake's Progress, 1982; Die Soldaten, 1983; Madame Butterfly, 1983; La Bohème, 1984; Faust, 1985; Princess Ida, 1992; Salomé, 1993.

PUBLICATIONS

A British Picture: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1989.

Fire Over England: British Cinema Comes Under Friendly Fire. London: Hutchinson, 1993.

The Lion Roars: Ken Russell on Film. Winchester, Massachusetts: Faber and Faber, 1993.

Ken Russell, a British filmmaker, is best known in the United States as director of such feature films as Women in Love (1969), The Music Lovers (1970), Tommy (1975), and Altered States (1980). Although his television work is less well known outside the United Kingdom, it has had a major impact on the development of the television genre of fictional history--described by historian C. Vann Woodward as the portrayal of "real historical figures and events, but with the license of the novelist to imagine and invent." Russell's special province in the genre (a psychobiographical form which he terms the "biopic"), has been music composers and other artists such as dancers and poets. His imaginative interpretations of the lives of artists have, on occasion, outraged both critics and the general public.

After a brief career as a ballet dancer, and later as a successful commercial photographer, Russell turned his attention to film directing. On the basis of a portfolio of three low-budget short films, he was hired by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 1959, at the age of 32, to work as a director on its arts series Monitor. Most of the Monitor pieces (10-15-minute short subjects) focused on contemporary artists working in British music, dance and literature. Russell noted that at the time there was no real experimental film school in Britain, except for Monitor. Monitor producer Huw Wheldon, who later became managing director of BBC-TV, encouraged experimentation, within limits, and Russell took full advantage of this.

The two most important productions from Russell's Monitor period were Elgar (1962) and The Debussy Film (1965). Elgar, Russell's attempt to counter British music critics' negative assessments of the British composer Edward Elgar, was his first full-length Monitor film, lasting 50 minutes. It marked the celebration of the 100th Monitor program. In Elgar, Russell advanced the idea of using actors to impersonate historical characters, which he had introduced the previous year on Monitor in the short film Portrait of a Soviet Composer, on the life of Sergei Prokofiev. Prior to this, the BBC had prohibited the use of actors in the portrayal of historical personages. In the Prokofiev film, Russell used an actor to show the composer's hands, a so-called "anonymous presence." In Elgar, Russell took the concept a step further, allowing Elgar to be seen (but still not heard). Five different actors, mostly amateurs, portrayed the composer at various stages of his life. Most of the scenes with the actors were shot in medium-shot. According to Russell, the viewer was "not aware of a personality; just a figure." Russell skillfully combined silent footage of the actors, stock footage of English life at the turn of the century, and photographs of Elgar and his family , all of which were enhanced by Elgar's compositions. Russell focused his interpretation on Elgar's reverence for the English countryside--his "return to the strength of the hills" (a theme of great importance in Russell's own life). That theme would re-emerge in many subsequent Russell biopics. Elgar was extremely popular with the audience, in large measure because of Russell's romantic use of Elgar's music, and was repeated at least three times. As Baxter points out, this work launched Russell's national reputation.

After an unsuccessful feature film, French Dressing, Russell returned to the BBC to direct The Debussy Film: Impressions of the French Composer (1965). Here, Russell broke through the BBC's last remaining prohibition against using actors in speaking roles in historical drama. According to Russell, as quoted in Phillips, Wheldon thought the film "a bit esoteric," and insisted on beginning the film "with a series of photographs of Debussy along with a spoken statement assuring viewers they were about to see a film based on incidents in Debussy's life and incorporating direct quotations from Debussy himself". The BBC feared that viewers might believe they were watching newsreels of real people. To circumvent this potential problem, Russell created an intriguing "film-within-a-film," in which the framing story depicts a French film director coming to England to shoot a film on Debussy. In the script, actors were clearly identified as actors playing the various historical figures. Russell, and writer Melvyn Bragg (who would collaborate with Russell on several films and later become the editor and presenter of The South Bank Show), conceived Debussy as "a mysterious, shadowy character"--an unpredictable and sensual dreamer. This is accentuated by Russell's evocative use of macabre physical comedy.

"Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World" (1966) is the most celebrated and least factual of Russell's BBC biopics. The film used a mix of classical music and popular tunes (from Beethoven to "Bye, Bye, Blackbird"), and featured a nude dance, suicide attempts, and wild parties to depict Isadora's sensational life and her death wish. Excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia were intercut with original footage, Hanke reports, to convey the "ideal of German perfection" Duncan sought to emulate. Isadora was at once "sublime" and "vulgar" if not grotesque. Interestingly, some of Russell's more hostile critics have accused the director of the same tendencies.

"Song of Summer" (BBC, 1968) chronicles the last years of the life of composer Frederick Delius, who, blind and crippled with syphilis, is living in a French village with his wife, Jelka and his amanuensis, Eric Fenby. Fenby, who advised Russell on the film, is portrayed as a young man who sacrificed his own career out of love and respect for Delius. In the end, according to Russell as quoted in Phillips, Fenby feels "robbed of his own artistic vision." The ultimate irony, says Russell, is that much of Delius's music is second rate. In "Song of Summer," Russell is able to express an understanding and even compassion for a composer whose basic personality and music he clearly dislikes. The theme, evident in Isadora, of what Hanke refers to as "the artist's unfortunate need to debase himself and his art" re-emerges here. As in "Elgar," Russell highlights the artist's obsession with nature. According to Hanke, in "Song of Summer" Russell exhibited his "ability to work in a restrained manner if the subject matter calls for it."

The last film Russell would make for the BBC, the infamous The Dance of the Seven Veils: A Comic Strip in Seven Episodes on the Life of Richard Strauss (1970), exhibited no such restraint. The complete title reveals Russell's intention to create a satirical political cartoon on the life of the German composer, who Russell saw as a "self-advertising, vulgar, commercial man . . . [a] crypto-Nazi with the superman complex underneath the facade of the distinguished elderly composer." And, although, according to Russell, "95 percent of what Strauss says in the film he actually did say in his letters and other writings," many critics and viewers found Russell's treatment of the venerated composer itself to be vulgar. Hanke's assessment is that in the film, Russell contends that Strauss "betrayed himself and his art through his lack of personal responsibility," which included his currying favor with the Nazis during World War II. The most objectionable sequences in the film were Strauss conducting Der Rosenkavlier and exhorting his musicians to play ever louder to drown own the screams of a Jew being tortured in the audience by SS men, who were carving a Star of David on his chest with a knife; and the playing of Strauss's Domestic Symphony over shots of Strauss and his wife making love, their climax being mirrored by the orchestra. The film concludes with Russell himself portraying a wild-haired orchestra conductor bowing and walking away from the camera as his director's credit appears on the screen (perhaps signaling his own farewell to the BBC). The film aired once, leading to mass protests and questions raised in Parliament. As Russell put it, "all hell broke loose." Huw Wheldon, by then head of BBC-TV, defended Russell. At the same time, the BBC tried to placate critics, including Strauss's family and his publisher, by presenting a roundtable discussion in which music critics and conductors denounced both Russell and the film. By the time The Dance of the Seven Veils aired on the BBC, Russell's feature film Women in Love had assured him a reputation in feature film circles. The BBC experience convinced him it was time to abandon the small screen.

Russell would return to television, but not to the BBC. He was in fact eager to return to television, where he felt he could make more "personal and optimistic films." In 1978 Russell directed Clouds of Glory for British independent television's Grenada-TV. This was actually two one-hour episodes. The first, William and Dorothy, was a biopic on the love of William Wordsworth for his sister Dorothy. Their relationship was understated in the film; neither William nor Dorothy ever explicitly verbalized its incestuous nature. The second episode, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was a biopic on the lurid life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lines from the title poem are recited over various scenes, accompanied by the music of British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams. In one fantasy sequence Coleridge, the opium addict, buries an anchor in his estranged wife's breast--a reference to the albatross in the poem--as he attempts to rid himself of her.

In 1988, Russell directed and starred in Ken Russell's ABC of British Music, a special episode of London Weekend Television's The South Bank Show, hosted by Melvyn Bragg. This light-hearted treatment of a serious subject finds Russell, dressed in a variety of humorous costumes, running through the letters of the alphabet in a carnival barker's voice, extolling "neglected geniuses" of British classical and pop music and "bulldozing a few sacred cows at the same time." One of the most inventive moments comes with the letter "U": "U is for . . . ucch . . . critics." Here we see a dream-like video sequence of six midgets carrying a coffin through a field while, in their munchkin voices, they babble their condemnation of Elgar and Delius.

-Hal Himmelstein