British filmmaker Terence Davies, best known for two powerful, lyrical films inspired by his childhood in post-war Liverpool, has died aged 77.
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Davies’ manager John Taylor said the director died “peacefully at home in his sleep” on Saturday after a short illness.
Raised in a large working-class Roman Catholic family in the English port city, Davies worked as a clerk in a shipping office and as an accountant in an accounting firm before enrolling at a drama school in the city of Coventry and later at the National Film School.
After making several short films, Davies made his feature film debut as a writer and director in 1988 with Distant Voices, Still Lives, a dreamlike – sometimes nightmarish – collage of a film that evoked a childhood of poverty and violence, shot through with music and movie magic. The film won the Cannes International Critics’ Prize in 1988 and was voted the ninth best film of the last 25 years by British film critics in 2002.
Davies followed this with another autobiographical film, The Long Day Closes, in 1992 and later returned to Liverpool for the 2008 documentary Of Time and the City.
Michael Koresky, author of a book about Davies; said the director’s two autobiographical films were “melancholic, at times harrowing and also indescribably beautiful, two of the greatest works in all of cinema.”
“He probably doesn’t even have any imitators; No one would dare,” Koresky wrote on the British Film Institute website.
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The autobiographical films opened the door to larger budgets and more mainstream films, still featured Davies’ distinctive lyricism, and were often set in the 19th or early 20th century.
His 1995 film The Neon Bible is based on a novel by John Kennedy Toole and is set in the Deep South of the United States. The House of Mirth was released in 2000 and starred Gillian Anderson in an adaptation of the Edith Wharton classic. The film won the Best British Film award at the 2001 British Academy Film Awards.
In his 2011 film The Deep Blue Sea, based on a play by Terence Rattigan, Rachel Weisz played a woman torn between her reliable husband and her ruthless lover.
Model and actress Agyness Deyn starred in “Sunset Song,” a 2015 hymn to rural Scotland, and Davies portrayed the life of poet Emily Dickinson – played by Cynthia Nixon – in the 2016 film A Quiet Passion.
Davies’ last film, Benediction, was based on the life of World War I soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon. It starred Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi and the late Julian Sands.
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