NEW YORK, NY.- Terence Davies, a British screenwriter and director known for his poetic, intensely personal films including Distant Voices, Still Lives and literary adaptations such as like The House of Mirth, died Saturday at his home in the village of Mistley, Essex, on the southwest coast of England. He was 77.
His manager, John Taylor, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, saying only that Davies had died after a short illness.
An obituary from the British Film Institute said, No one made movies like Davies, who precisely sculpted out of a subjective past, creating films that glided on waves of contemplation and observation.
The very specific Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) starred Pete Postlethwaite as a violently abusive Liverpool father who terrorizes his wife and children. When the film was rereleased in 2018, The Guardian called it the directors early autobiographical masterpiece and declared it as gripping as any thriller.
When critics referred to Davies film dramas as musicals, they were only half joking. Songs are sung or heard in his movies just as they are in real life at bars, at celebrations, at church and on the radio.
In Distant Voices, the townspeople and their children sing Beer Barrel Polka in a bomb shelter to distract themselves from the horrors of World War II. Audiences hear If You Knew Susie at a wedding reception, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling while Postlethwaite takes a curry comb to a horse and Taking a Chance on Love issuing from a radio in the background even during the most brutal scenes.
The film won the International Critics Prize at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.
The House of Mirth (2000), based on Edith Whartons 1905 novel, starred Gillian Anderson as the doomed heroine, Lily Bart. Writing in The Village Voice, J. Hoberman called the film brilliantly adapted and Andersons performance unexpectedly stunning.
Stephen Holden of The New York Times found the film funereally gloomy, but he had to admit, he wrote, that the story was so gripping, it almost doesnt matter how its couched. And The San Francisco Chronicle praised it as such a mesmerizing downer. For all that, it grossed only $5 million worldwide (a little more than $9 million in todays currency).
The industry eventually forgave him for his commercial limitations and continued to back his films, including The Deep Blue Sea (2011), starring Rachel Weisz, which was based on Terence Rattigans 1952 play about a judges wife having an emotionally destructive affair.
It was not a blockbuster either, but critics were generally admiring. A review in New York magazine noted Davies ability to blend the particular with the iconic, to turn ordinary moments into something almost mythical.
Terence Davies was born on Nov. 10, 1945, in Liverpool, England, the youngest of 10 children in a working-class family.
When Terence was 7, his father died of cancer. He grew up in his mothers Roman Catholic faith but developed doubts and rejected religion completely when he was 22.
Then I realized its a lie, he recalled in an interview with The New Yorker in 2017. Men in frocks nothing else.
He left school at 15 and worked as a shipping clerk and a bookkeeper. More than a decade later, he changed course and enrolled in a drama school in Coventry, more than 100 miles south of Liverpool, near Birmingham.
He was still a student when he began work on his first short film, Children (1976), later edited into The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983).
The next half-century or so brought Davies awards, film festival attention and a prestigious list of credits.
He did The Long Day Closes (1992), a young gay mans battle with the church, his family and his own guilt; The Neon Bible (1995), starring Gena Rowlands, based on John Kennedy Tooles novel, set in the American South; the documentary Of Time and the City (2008), a history of and reflection on his hometown, Liverpool (a lovely, astringent film, A.O. Scott wrote in the Times); and Sunset Song (2015), starring Agyness Deyn, based on Lewis Grassic Gibbons novel about coming of age in early 1900s Scotland.
Finally, Davies, who always said that he was drawn to the past, began to explore the lives of the poets themselves.
He made A Quiet Passion (2016), in which Cynthia Nixon portrays Emily Dickinson, the reclusive 19th-century American poet. The Times critic found that Davies possessed a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.
His last film was Benediction (2021), a drama about World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. The New Yorker called it an energizing and inspiring movie about the vanity of existence itself.
Davies, who was gay and never married, leaves no known survivors and had lived alone since 1980. He had tried the gay dating scene, he said, and dismissed it for, among other reasons, what he called its devotion to narcissism.
Lamenting the age of complete license in the arts as well as in daily life, he told LA Weekly in 2012: The first thing that goes is subtlety. The first thing that goes is any kind of restraint or even wit sometimes. I dont know how to deal with that in the modern world.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.