Ken Russell, flamboyant English film director, was born 96 years ago today
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Ken Russell, flamboyant English film director, was born 96 years ago today
Ken Russell, the English film director known for his flamboyant style, was born 96 years ago today.
Russell was known for his pioneering work in television and film. His films often dealt with the lives of famous composers or were based on other works of art which he adapted loosely.
He began directing for the BBC, where he made creative adaptations of composers' lives which were unusual for the time. He also directed feature films independently and for studios.
Russell is best known for his Oscar-winning film, Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), The Who's Tommy (1975) and the science fiction film, Altered States (1980).
Classical musicians and conductors hold him in high regard for his story-driven biopics of various composers, most famously Elgar, Delius, Liszt, Mahler and Tchaikovsky.
British film critic Mark Kermode called Russell "somebody who proved that British cinema didn't have to be about kitchen-sink realism — it could be every bit as flamboyant as Fellini.”
Born in Southampton, England, Russell spent much of his time at the cinema with his mother, who was mentally ill. He cited Die Nibelungen and The Secret of the Loch as two early influences. He was educated at private schools in Walthamstow and at Pangbourne College, and studied photography at Walthamstow Technical College (now part of the University of East London).
He moved into television work after short careers in dance and photography.
His series of documentary “Teddy Girl” photographs were published in Picture Post magazine in 1955, and he continued to work as a freelance documentary photographer until 1959.
After 1959, Russell's amateur films (his documentaries for the Free Cinema movement, and his 1958 short, Amelia and the Angel, secured him a job at the BBC. Between 1959 to 1970, Russell directed art documentaries for Monitor and Omnibus.
His best known works during this period include: Elgar (1962), The Debussy Film (1965), Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967), Song of Summer (about Frederick Delius and Eric Fenby, 1968) and Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), a film about Richard Strauss.
He once said that the best film he ever made was Song of Summer, and, looking back, he wouldn't edit a single shot. With Elgar it was the first time that an arts' program (Monitor) had shown one long film about an artistic figure instead of short items, and also it was the first time that re-enactments were used.
Russell fought with the BBC over using actors to portray different ages of the same character, instead of the traditional photograph stills and documentary footage. His television films became increasingly flamboyant and outrageous.
Dance of the Seven Veils sought to portray Richard Strauss as a Nazi. One scene in particular showed a Jew being tortured, while a group of SS men look on in delight, to the tune of Strauss's music. The Strauss family was so outraged they withdrew all music rights so that the film is effectively banned from being screened until Strauss's copyright expires in 2019.
Russell's first feature film was French Dressing (1963), a comedy loosely based on Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman. Its critical and commercial failure sent Russell back to the BBC. His second big-screen effort was part of author Len Deighton's Harry Palmer spy cycle, Billion Dollar Brain (1967), starring Michael Caine.
In 1969, Russell directed what is considered his "signature film" — Women In Love, an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's novel of the same name about two artist sisters living in post-World War I Britain.
The film starred Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, Jennie Linden and Alan Bates. It is notable for its nude wrestling scene, which broke the convention at the time that a mainstream movie could not show male genitalia.
Women in Love connected with the sexual revolution and bohemian politics of the late 1960s. It was nominated for several Oscars and won one for Glenda Jackson for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Russell himself was nominated for an Oscar — that for Best Director (his only nomination)— as were his cinematographer and screenwriter. He followed, Women in Love, with a string of innovative adult-themed films which were often as controversial as they were successful.
The Music Lovers (1970), a biopic of Tchaikovsky, starred Richard Chamberlain as a flamboyant Tchaikovsky and Glenda Jackson as his wife. The score was conducted by André Previn. The following year, Russell released The Devils, a film so controversial that its backers, the American company Warner Bros., refused to release it uncut.
Inspired by Aldous Huxley's book, The Devils of Loudun, and using material from John Whiting's play, The Devils, it starred Oliver Reed as a priest who stands in the way of a corrupt church and state. Helped by publicity over the more sensational scenes, featuring sexuality among nuns, the film topped British box office receipts for eight weeks.
In the United States, the film, which had already been cut for distribution in Britain, was further edited. It has never played in anything like its original state in America.
Russell followed The Devils with a reworking of the period musical, The Boy Friend, for which he cast the model, Twiggy. She won two Golden Globe Awards for her performance: one for Best Actress in a musical comedy and one for the best newcomer. The film was heavily cut, shorn of two musical numbers for its American release, where it was not a big success.
Russell himself provided most of the financing for Savage Messiah, a biopic of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He worked with David Puttnam on Mahler.
In 1975, Russell's star-studded film version of The Who's rock opera, Tommy, starring Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Elton John, Tina Turner, Eric Clapton and Jack Nicholson, spent a record fourteen weeks at the #1 spot and played to full houses for over a year.
Two months before Tommy was released in March, 1975, Russell started work on Lisztomania, another vehicle for Roger Daltrey and for the film scoring of progressive rocker, Rick Wakeman. In the film, the good music of Franz Liszt is stolen by Richard Wagner who, in his operas, puts forward the theme of the Superman.
Tommy and Lisztomania were important in the rise of improved motion picture sound in the 1970s, as they were among the first films to be released with Dolby-encoded soundtracks. Lisztomania, tagged as "the film that out-Tommys 'Tommy'," topped the British box-office for two weeks in November, 1975, when Tommy was still in the list of the week's top five box-office hits.
Russell's next film, the 1977 biopic, Valentino, also topped the British box-office for two weeks, but was not a hit in America. Russell's 1980 effort, Altered States, was a departure in both genre and tone, in that it is Russell's only foray into science fiction.
Working from Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay (based upon his novel), Russell used his penchant for elaborate visual effects to translate Chayefsky's hallucinatory story to the cinema, and took the opportunity to add his trademark religious and sexual imagery. The film had an innovative Oscar-nominated score by John Corigliano.
After taking a break from film to direct opera, Russell found financing with various independent companies. During this period, he directed Gothic (1986) with Gabriel Byrne, about the night Mary Shelley told the tale of Frankenstein, and The Lair of the White Worm (1988) with Amanda Donohoe and Hugh Grant, based on a novella by Bram Stoker.
In 1988, came the release of Salome's Last Dance, a loosely adapted esoteric tribute to Oscar Wilde's controversial play Salome, which was banned on the 19th century London stage. The cult movie defines Russell's adult themed romance with the Theater of The Poor and was also notable for the screen presence of Imogen Millais-Scott as Salome.
Russell finished the 1980s with The Rainbow, another D. H. Lawrence adaptation, which also happens to be the prequel to Women in Love. Glenda Jackson played the mother of her character in the previous film.
In the 1990 film, The Russia House, starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, Russell made one of his first significant acting appearances, portraying Walter, an ambiguously gay British intelligence officer who discomfits his more strait-laced CIA counterparts. Russell henceforth occasionally acted.
In May, 1995, he was honored with a retrospective of his work presented in Hollywood by the American Cinematheque. Titled Shock Value, it included some of Russell's most successful and controversial films and also several of his early BBC productions.
Russell attended the festival and engaged in lengthy post-screening discussions of each film with audiences and moderator, Martin Lewis, who had instigated and curated the retrospective.
Ken Russell and his wife, Lisi Tribble, were invited by New York film writer Shade Rupe on a six-week journey across North America, beginning with a Lifetime Achievement Award given by Mitch Davis at the Fantasia film festival on July 20, 2010.
Ken Russell died on November 27, 2011 at the age of 84.
Tom Stoppard is 86 years old today.
A Czech-born British playwright who was knighted in 1997, Stoppard has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love, and has received an Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy.
Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
In 1939, Stoppard left Czechoslovakia as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain in 1946 after the war.
After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, a "shoe town," in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. Both of his parents were Jewish, though neither practicing.
Just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the town's patron, Thomas J. Bata, helped re-post his Jewish employees, mostly physicians, to various branches of his firm all over the world.
On March 15, 1939, the day that the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Straussler family fled to Singapore, one of the places Bata had a company. Before the Japanese occupation of Singapore, the two sons and their mother were sent on to Australia.
Stoppard's father remained in Singapore as a British army volunteer, knowing that, as a doctor, he would be needed in its defense. His father died when Stoppard was four years old.
From there, in 1941, when Tomas was five, the three were evacuated to Darjeeling in India. The boys attended Mount Hermon School, an American multi-racial school, where Tomas became Tom and his brother, Petr, became Peter.
In 1945, his mother, Martha, married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, who gave the boys his English surname and, in 1946, after the war, moved the family to England.
His stepfather believed strongly that "to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life" – a quote from Cecil Rhodes – telling his small stepson: "Don't you realize that I made you British?" setting up Stoppard's desire as a child to become "an honorary Englishman."
Stoppard left school at seventeen and began work as a journalist for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, never receiving a university education. Years later, he came to regret not going to university, but at the time he loved his work as a journalist and felt passionately about his career.
He remained at the paper from 1954 until 1958, when the Bristol Evening World offered Stoppard the position of feature writer, humor columnist and secondary drama critic, which took Stoppard into the world of theatre.
At the Bristol Old Vic – at the time a well-regarded regional repertory company – Stoppard formed friendships with the director, John Boorman, and the actor, Peter O'Toole, early in their careers. In Bristol, he became known more for his strained attempts at humor and unstylish clothes than for his writing.
Stoppard wrote short radio plays in 1953 and 54, and by 1960 he had completed his first stage play, A Walk on the Water, which was later re-titled, Enter a Free Man (1968). He noted that the work owed much to Robert Bolt's play, Flowering Cherry, and to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Within a week after sending A Walk on the Water to an agent, Stoppard received his version of the "Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists' lives."
His first play was optioned, staged in Hamburg, then broadcast on British Independent Television in 1963. From September, 1962 until April, 1963, Stoppard worked in London as a drama critic for Scene magazine, writing reviews and interviews both under his name and the pseudonym, William Boot, taken from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.
In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend five months writing in a Berlin mansion, emerging with a one-act play titled, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear. It later evolved into his Tony-winning play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. His success as a playwright had begun.
Here Stoppard talks with Charlie Rose about how a dramatist controls the information in a story that reaches the audience.
The second Atlanta Pop Festival in July, 1970 drew one of the largest rock festival audiences anywhere during the Sixties era.
Photo by Earl McGehee
Remembering the Atlanta International Pop Festival of 1970
Perhaps it was because I missed Woodstock the summer before, I’m no longer sure. But I certainly was not going to miss the second Atlanta International Pop Festival which began on this day in 1970 — 53 years ago.
It was a hell of a lineup, even then.
The festival was held at the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia and it went from July 3 until near dawn on the July 6. I clearly remember Jimi Hendrix destroying his guitar with the “Star Spangled Banner” about midnight on July 4. Who could forget?
Tickets for the festival were only $14, but like Woodstock before it, it became an "open event" when the promoter threw open the gates after crowds outside began to tear down the plywood fence that had been erected around the site. Estimates were that up 600,000 people attended.
On the bill, in addition to Hendrix, were the Allman Brothers Band, B.B. King, Procol Harum, the Chambers Brothers, Poco, Grand Funk Railroad, Ravi Shankar, Richie Havens, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter, John Sebastian, Mountain, Spirit and Terry Reid.
It would become one of the last big open, free concerts. There was no real “security” at the time, the word hadn’t even been coined yet. No “merch,” either. T-shirts were homemade, mostly. And, there were no cell phones, pagers, Internet or personal computers. Back then I seemed to have plenty of money, though I wasn’t rich by any means. It was one of the last of the great times of the decade!
Corporations hadn’t yet taken over rock music. Half the crowd was naked and there were so many drugs that the festival now is a blur.
But, man, it was fun. A time of discovery and adventure. A magic moment in my life, for sure.
Lonnie Smith, master of jazz on the Hammond B3 organ, was born 81 years ago today.
A member of the George Benson quartet in the 1960s, Smith recorded albums with saxophonist Lou Donaldson for Blue Note before being signed as a solo act. He owned the label, Pilgrimage.
Born in Lackawanna, New York, he was raised by his mother and stepfather, and the family had a vocal group and radio program. His mother was a major influence on him musically, as she introduced him to gospel, classical and jazz.
Smith moved to New York City in 1965, where he met George Bensoin, the guitarist fo Jack McDuff's band. Benson and Smith connected on a personal level, and the two formed the George Benson Quartet, featuring Lonnie Smith, in 1966.
He had five children: Lani, Chandra, Charisse, Lonnie, and Vonnie.
Smith died of pulmonary fibrosis on September 28, 2021, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at the age of 79.
Laura Branigan was born 71 years ago today.
A singer, songwriter and actress, Branigan is best remembered for her 1982 hit, "Gloria," and for the Top Ten single, "Self Control." She also performed, "Solitaire," and for the #1 Adult Contemporary hit, "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You," as well as several other U.S. Top 40 hits.
As well as her music, she was also known for her powerful, husky alto singing voice which spanned four octaves.
Branigan also contributed songs to notable motion picture and television soundtracks, including the Flashdance soundtrack (1983), the Ghostbusters soundtrack (1984) and the Baywatch soundtrack (1994).
Her signature song, "Gloria," by Umberto Tozzi stayed on the Top 100 chart for 36 weeks, at the time a record for a female artist. The song holds a place in the Top 100 singles of both 1982 and 1983.
Branigan died at her home in 2004 from a previously undiagnosed cerebral aneurysm.
Kafka by Andy Warhol
Franz Kafka was born 140 years ago today.
A German-language writer of novels and short stories, Kafka is regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. He was strongly influenced by genres such as existentialism.
Most of his works, such as "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), Der Prozess (The Trial) and Das Schloss (The Castle), are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent–child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, labyrinths of bureaucracy and mystical transformations.
Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In his lifetime, most of the population of Prague spoke Czech, and the division between Czech- and German-speaking people was a tangible reality — as both groups were strengthening their national identity.
The Jewish community often found itself in between the two sentiments, naturally raising questions about a place to which one belongs.
Kafka himself was fluent in both languages, considering German his native tongue. He trained as a lawyer and, after completing his legal education, obtained employment with an insurance company. He began to write short stories in his spare time.
For the rest of his life, he complained about the little time he had to devote to what he came to regard as his calling. He regretted having to devote so much attention to his Brotberuf ("day job," literally, "bread job").
Kafka preferred to communicate by letter. He wrote hundreds of letters to family and close female friends, including his father, his fiancée Felice Bauer and his youngest sister, Ottla.
Kafka had a complicated and troubled relationship with his father that had a major effect on his writing. He also suffered conflict over being Jewish, feeling that it had little to do with him, although critics argue that it influenced his writing.
Only a few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime. They included the story collections, Betrachtung (Contemplation) and Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), and individual stories (such as "Die Verwandlung") in literary magazines.
He prepared the story collection Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) for print, but it was not published until after his death.
Kafka's unfinished works, including his novels Der Prozess, Das Schloss and Amerika (also known as Der Verschollene, The Man Who Disappeared), were published posthumously, mostly by his friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka's wish to have the manuscripts destroyed.
Albert Camus, Gabriel García Márquez and Jean-Paul Sartre are among the writers influenced by Kafka's work.
The term, Kafkaesque, has entered the English language to describe surreal situations like those in his writing.
Audra McDonald is 53 years old today.
An actress and singer, McDonald has appeared on stage in both musicals and dramas. Her credits include Ragtime, A Raisin in the Sun, Porgy and Bess and as Billie Holiday on Broadway in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill.
McDonald maintains an active concert and recording career, performing song cycles and operas as well as performing in concert throughout the U.S. She has won six Tony Awards, more performance wins than any other actor, and is the only person to win all four acting categories.
Born in West Berlin, Germany, McDonald is the daughter of American parents, Anna Kathryn, a university administrator, and Stanley McDonald, Jr., a high school principal. At the time of her birth, her father was stationed with the U.S. Army. McDonald was raised in Fresno, California, the elder of two daughters.
She began to study acting at a young age to counteract her diagnosis as "hyperactive.” McDonald graduated from the Roosevelt School of the Arts program within Theodore Roosevelt High School in Fresno. She got her start in acting with Dan Pessano and Good Company Players, beginning in their junior company.
McDonald was a three-time Tony Award winner by age 28 for her performances in Carousel, Master Class and Ragtime, placing her alongside Shirley Booth, Gwen Verdon and Zero Mostel by accomplishing this feat within five years.
McDonald has also made many television appearances, both musical and dramatic. In films, McDonald has appeared in Best Thief in the World (2004), It Runs in the Family (2003), Cradle Will Rock (1999), The Object of My Affection (1998) and Seven Servants by Daryush Shokof which was her film acting debut in (1996).
Here, McDonald discusses her role as Billie Holiday in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill.”
A Sunday afternoon on the family lawn, Westchester, New York, 1968
Photo by Diane Arbus