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Terence Davies (10 November 1945 – 7 October 2023) was a British screenwriter, film director, and novelist. He is best known as the writer and director of autobiographical films, including Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992) and the collage film Of Time and the City (2008), as well as the literary adaptations The Neon Bible (1995), The House of Mirth (2000), The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and Sunset Song (2015). His final two feature films were centered around the lives of influential literary figures, Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016) and Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (2021). Davies was considered by some critics as one of the great British directors of his period.
After leaving school at 16, Davies worked for ten years as a shipping office clerk and as an unqualified accountant, before leaving Liverpool in 1971 to attend Coventry Drama School.
Davies's next two features, The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth, were adaptations of novels by John Kennedy Toole and Edith Wharton respectively. The House of Mirth received favourable reviews, with Film Comment naming it one of the ten best films of 2000. Gillian Anderson won Best Performance in the Second Annual Village Voice Film Critics' Poll and the film was named the third best film of 2000 in the same poll.
In the interim, Davies produced two works for radio, A Walk to the Paradise Garden, an original radio play broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2001, and a two-part adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2007.
The long interval between films ended with his only documentary, Of Time and the City, which was premiered out of competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The work uses vintage newsreel footage, contemporary popular music and Davies's narration in a paean to Liverpool. It received positive reviews on its premiere.
In 2010, after completing Of Time and the City, Davies produced a third radio project, Intensive Care, a personal recollection of his youth and his relationship with his mother.
Davies finally found financing for Sunset Song in 2012, and it went into production in 2014. In October 2014 the film went into post-production. It was released in 2015. During this time, an attempted adaptation of Richard McCann's Mother of Sorrows did not come to fruition.
Davies's next film was A Quiet Passion, based on the life of the American poet Emily Dickinson.
His last film, Benediction (2021), tells the story of the British war poet and memoirist Siegfried Sassoon.
In February 2023, it was announced that Davies was working on a film adaptation of Stefan Zweig's novel The Post Office Girl, though the project was subsequently abandoned due to a lack of funding. Davies said he was working on another script in September 2023, the month before he died. After his death, the script was revealed to be based on Janette Jenkins's novel Firefly, which focuses on the last five days in the life of playwright and composer Noël Coward.
Discussing the impact his childhood had on him, Davies described his father as a "psychotic" man who made him feel "terrified all the time", and that the years following his father's death were the happiest of his childhood. He stated, "The one thing I can't bear now is atmospheres. I can come into a room full of people and I can tell you who's had an. I always say: if I've upset you, just come out with it. If you cold-shoulder me, I instantly see my sitting in the corner of the parlour and I'm a seven-year-old again."
On 7 October 2023, at the age of 77, Davies died of cancer at his home in Mistley.
Later films
Davies's The Deep Blue Sea, based on the play by Terence Rattigan, was commissioned by the Rattigan Trust. The film was met with widespread acclaim, and Rachel Weisz won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and topped the Village Voice Film Critics' Poll for best lead female performance.
Personal life
Davies lived in an 18th-century cottage in Mistley from the early 1990s until his death in 2023. Davies was openly gay and often explored gay themes in his work, though he said his most serious relationship was with a woman in the late 1970s, and that he later went "on to the gay scene for a couple of months" before deciding he was also uninterested in relationships with men. In 2015, he told The Guardian that he had been celibate for most of his life, adding in another interview with the newspaper in 2022 that he would "prefer to be lonely and on his own" than to live a life he "couldn't justify" to himself.
Filmography
Source, unless specified:
Distant Voices, Still Lives The Long Day Closes The Neon Bible The House of Mirth The Deep Blue Sea Sunset Song A Quiet Passion Benediction
Of Time and the City
Also released in 1983 as part of the anthology film The Terence Davies Trilogy Madonna and Child Death and Transfiguration Ephemeral film produced for the Vienna International Film Festival Produced for the Film Fest Gent's 2x25 project
Bibliography
novel collected screenplays
Awards and nominations
External links
Categories: Official Website, 1945 Births, 2023 Deaths, 20th-century English Novelists, Alumni Of The National Film And Television School, British Lgbtq Film Directors, Collage Filmmakers, Deaths From Cancer In England, English Lgbtq Dramatists And Playwrights, English Lgbtq Screenwriters, English Atheists, English Film Directors, English Gay Writers, English Male Dramatists And Playwrights, English Male Screenwriters, English People Of Irish Descent, English Radio Writers, Former Roman Catholics, Gay Dramatists And Playwrights, Gay Screenwriters, People From Tendring, Writers From Liverpool
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