Ken russell

Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was born in Southampton on July 3, 1927. After serving in the Royal Air Force and working in the field of shipping, he excelled with his photography, and directed documentaries as an amateur. Thanks to all these works he gets a job for the BBC, where at first he shoots several documentaries about art.

During his time on television, he stood out with his extravagant telefilms about famous composers, such as The Debussy Film , close to surrealism, and Dance of the Seven Veils , about Richard Strauss , which caused a great scandal, especially because the Strauss family opposed to your exhibition. His film Pop Goes the Ease l, about Pop Art, had a great impact , which influenced Stanley Kubrick , since he shot A Clockwork Orange with a very similar aesthetic.

On the big screen he made his debut with French Dressing , a resounding flop, so Russell had to return to the BBC for three years. He finally released on the big screen The Million Dollar Brain , his most conventional film, which is part of the series about agent Harry Palmer, played by Michael Caine .

In 1969 he achieved enormous success with Women in Love , an adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel for which Glenda Jackson won the Best Actress Oscar, and which showed a male frontal nude for the first time in a commercial film. The passion of living is an atypical biography of Tchaikovsky.

In the 1970s, Ken Russell broke loose, unleashing his passion for scandal and provocation. In that sense, he takes the cake The Demons , with Oliver Reed playing a priest, and which is nothing more than an accumulation of nudity and anti-clerical proclamations. Distributors in the United States and Great Britain decided to release it by cutting numerous fragments. The showy musical The Boyfriend also suffered cuts .

Another musical, Tommy , based on the rock opera by The Who, was one of his biggest hits, although other of his films had a more low-key reception, such as the psychedelic A Mind-Blowing Journey to the Bottom of Death , with William Hurt as a scientist who experiences in himself the effects of hallucinogenic drugs.

In The Passion of China Blue , Kathleen Turner played a fashion designer who worked as a prostitute at night, while Anthony Perkins played a television preacher. During filming, Russell felt so pressured by the production company that he decided not to shoot in Hollywood again. He returned to the UK to shoot the visually excessive Gothic , around the creation of the novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley , a subject treated in a very different way, but later with better success by Gonzalo Suárez in Rowing the Wind . Interestingly, the same year as Hugh GrantHe shot the Spanish film, he was also one of the protagonists of Russell’s film The Guard of the White Worm , an adaptation of a novel by another legendary writer of the horror genre, Bram Stoker , the creator of Dracula.

He divorced in 1978 from Shirley Russell, costume designer of numerous tapes, including some of his, with whom he had five children, who are also dedicated to cinema, in different modalities. Since then, Ken Russell has been linked to three other women.

In the 1990s, Ken Russell was completely abandoned by the general public. Puta had some impact , with Theresa Russell (who, despite her last name, is not related to the filmmaker in the family) playing a prostitute, who tells the camera about the dangers of her profession. He himself played a secondary character, as well as in Fred Schepisi ‘s film The Russian House , where he played a homosexual. During the last stage of his career he returned to horror with The Fall of the House of Usher (2002) , an unsuccessful adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe ‘s story , and the segment “The Girl With Golden Breasts” from the horror film Trapped Ashes .