Terence Davies
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Terence Davies, the critically beloved British writer and director who made his international breakthrough with two deeply autobiographical films set in his native Liverpool, England: “Distant Voices,” “Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes.” Arthouse created, died. He was 77.
Davies’ official Instagram account confirmed the news on Saturday morning, noting that the filmmaker died peacefully at home after a short illness.
Much of Davies’ work is steeped in personal emotional experience and subtly reflects growing up as a gay, Catholic man in 1950s and 1960s Liverpool. In his 2008 documentary “Of Time and the City,” the filmmaker directly addressed his childhood.
The documentary, which premiered to great acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival that same year, recalled both Davies’ own family life and that of the city, using archival footage, his own voice-over commentary, classical music tracks, film clips and excerpts from Assemblage used poems and literature in one film, alternately bitingly funny and melancholic, but always heartfelt.
Davies spoke to at the time about the emotional process that went into making the film and how he struggled to balance his faith with his sexuality.
“During filming, I returned to my parish church,” he told THR. “I once prayed for forgiveness until my knees were bleeding and I had done nothing. You can’t get rid of it, the guilt. You are ipso facto a sinner because you have original sin in your soul. It is wrong.”
In his review of Davies’ final film, a biographical drama about British World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon titled Benediction, THR film critic David Rooney praised the director by referencing his previous work.
“Davies set the bar high for himself with the unique films that put him on the map from the late ’80s onwards,” he wrote, “two deeply personal family dramas set in his hometown of Liverpool, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day .” Closes; the wonderful documentary about his hometown, Of Time and the City; and one of Edith Wharton’s best film adaptations, The House of Mirth.”
The review also notes that while queer subtext ran throughout the openly gay Davies’ filmography for decades, the “deeply moving” Benediction was his first film to explore romantic love between men through a series of relationships that Sassoon after his return from the battle, was openly discussed.
Davies was born in Liverpool on November 10, 1945, the youngest of ten children of Catholic working-class parents. His mother was deeply religious and his father – whom he described as “psychotic” in a 2021 Guardian interview – died of cancer when the filmmaker was just seven.
The director attended Coventry Drama School for ten years after leaving school at 16. While studying there he wrote the screenplay for the autobiographical short film Children, the first part of a trilogy that included Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration and dealt with his early life, his time as a young office worker in Liverpool and finally his own death.
After the success of his autobiographical companion pieces – Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988 and The Long Day Closes in 1992 – Davies made his first film set in America, The Neon Bible in 1995. But this adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s novel about a boy’s coming of age in 1940s Georgia was poorly received in competition at Cannes. The director later acknowledged that the film didn’t work, calling it a transitional film that still gave him the tools he needed to tackle “The House of Mirth.”
This adaptation of Wharton’s 2000 novel, starring Gillian Anderson, Laura Linney and Eric Stoltz, premiered at the New York Film Festival. Its incisive depiction of class divisions and social cruelty in the final years of America’s Golden Age gave it unusual vitality for a period piece.
Davies often spoke in interviews about the short-sightedness of the British film industry and its fixation on mass-market commercial appeal. Although he was a globally known figure after his early films – he received awards at several international film festivals, including Cannes, Toronto and Locarno – he struggled for years to obtain financing for a number of projects.
Aside from “Of Time and the City,” it took eleven years for him to make his next feature film after “The House of Mirth.” This was a slow-paced adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea that captured the raging undercurrents beneath the surface of the British playwright’s work. The film gave Rachel Weisz one of the standout roles of her career and earned her the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actress Award.
Davies filmed the intimate drama Sunset Song in 2015, a project that took 18 years to get financed. Based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel, it depicts the difficult life of a Scottish farm girl in the early 20th century. The following year he made the detailed biographical portrait “A Quiet Passion,” starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson.
Another five years passed until Davies’ final film, Benediction, was released in 2021. This project also reflected the unique interweaving of poetry and cinema in the work of a director who had built an enthusiastic critical following over the course of his four-decade career. although his own national film industry continued to underestimate him.
In the previously quoted 2021 Guardian interview, Davies reflected on the lack of institutional recognition for his work in the UK: “It would have been nice to be recognized by BAFTA. But they never did that. On the other hand, part of me also thinks: Isn’t this just vanity? When a film lives every time it is seen, that is the true reward.”