NEW YORK - Ken Russell, the English filmmaker and writer whose outsize personality matched the confrontational brashness of his movies, died Sunday, news agencies reported. He was 84.
The Associated Press quoted his son, Alex Verney-Elliott, as saying that Mr. Russell died after a series of strokes.
A polemical figure who delighted in breaching the limits of propriety and cinematic good taste, Mr. Russell courted controversy through much of his career. His most popular film, the D.H. Lawrence adaptation “Women in Love’’ (1969), and his most notorious one, “The Devils’’ (1971), about a 17th-century outbreak of religious hysteria, both caused run-ins with censors.
The flamboyance and intemperance of his movies were all the more notable coming at a time when British cinema and television were still largely known for the kitchen-sink style of social realism. During the 1970s, his most active decade as a feature-film director, he made a series of artist biopics and rock operas that his supporters admired for their delirious excesses and that his detractors dismissed as vulgar kitsch.
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was born in Southampton, England, the son of a shoe store owner. He described his childhood as a lonely one, with many an afternoon spent at the movies, alone, or with his mother. As a teenager, he attended nautical school, where he said he had won over the bullies by putting on amateur productions of Dorothy Lamour musicals. He served briefly in the Merchant Navy and the Royal Air Force, then moved to London, where he studied dance before turning to photography in his late 20s.
Mr. Russell’s work as a freelance photographer and filmmaker led in 1959 to a job at the BBC, where he made dozens of arts documentaries, most notably a 1962 piece on English composer Edward Elgar, unusual at the time for its use of reenactments. His other subjects included composers Sergei Prokofiev and Claude Debussy, dancer Isadora Duncan, and painter Henri Rousseau.
The fascination with genius, ambition, and the creative process - and the project of making high culture accessible to a popular audience - continued in Mr. Russell’s later fictional features. Many of them take considerable liberties in exploring the lives and works of composers and artists: the Tchaikovsky biopic “The Music Lovers’’ (1970);’’Savage Messiah’’ (1972), about French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; “Mahler’’ (1974); and “Lisztomania’’ (1975), which imagined Franz Liszt as the original pop superstar.
Mr. Russell’s career in feature films began with a couple of lightweight genre assignments - the romantic comedy “French Dressing’’ (1964) and “Billion Dollar Brain’’ (1967), a spy movie with Michael Caine - and took off with “Women in Love’’ (1969), a sensuous period piece that connected with the liberated sexual politics of the late 1960s. Although the film was generally well reviewed and a mainstream success - it earned Mr. Russell his one Academy Award nomination for best director and won Glenda Jackson an Oscar for best actress - it was also the first glimpse of his flair for provocation.
“The Dance of the Seven Veils,’’ a caricatured television drama from 1970, emphasized the connections of the composer Richard Strauss to the Third Reich. The Strauss estate withdrew the music rights, and the film, the last that Mr. Russell made for the BBC, remains suppressed to this day.
Despite his affinity for classical music, Mr. Russell’s films had more in common with the flashy British rock scene of the day. This connection was made explicit with “Tommy’’ (1975), his frenzied film version of the Who’s rock opera and concept album. He combined classical and rock music in the follow-up, “Lisztomania’’ (1975), which starred the Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltrey, and featured a cameo by Ringo Starr.
Critics tended to welcome each new Ken Russell film as target practice. Reviewing “The Devils’’ in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called Mr. Russell “a hobbyist determined to reproduce ‘The Last Supper’ in bottle tops.’’ Pauline Kael called him a “shrill, screaming gossip.’’
Mr. Russell was not above fighting back. Appearing on live television shortly after the release of “The Devils’’ with British critic Alexander Walker, who had denounced the film as “monstrously indecent,’’ Mr. Russell hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.
But even his staunchest critics would acknowledge that Mr. Russell left his mark on the medium. The nascent music video aesthetic of the 1980s can be traced to the slick surfaces, rapid montage, and voracious pastiche of his films (he lifted liberally from the likes of Federico Fellini and Jean Cocteau).
He had a knack for casting ascendant stars (Vanessa Redgrave, Glenda Jackson) and he sought out talented collaborators: Two of his 1960s films were scored by French composer Georges Delerue; he hired the young Derek Jarman as a production designer on “The Devils.’’
Even in the prime of his career Mr. Russell cycled between hits and flops.
Time and again he bounced back from critical and commercial disasters like “Lisztomania’’ and “Valentino.’’ He ventured into the US studio system with “Altered States’’ (1980), a hallucinogenic science fiction film starring William Hurt. In his autobiography, Mr. Russell revealed that he was hired by Warner Brothers only after 26 other directors had passed on the project.
He feuded with screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who took his name off the project, but “Altered States’’ earned him some of his best reviews and has since developed a cult following.
Mr. Russell’s career never fully recovered from his 1984 flop, “Crimes of Passion.’’ But even with his directing career in eclipse, Mr. Russell kept busy with films and documentaries for British television, occasional acting roles, and self-financed low-budget features like “The Fall of the Louse of Usher,’’ a 2002 horror spoof shot in his backyard.
In Britain he remained a public gadfly into his 70s and 80s, appearing on television talk shows and writing a column for The Times of London. In 2007 he joined the cast of the reality television series “Celebrity Big Brother’’ and left the show after getting into an argument with another house guest, Jade Goody.