The British film director and screenwriter Terence Davies, author of films such as Distant Voices, The Deep Blue Sea and The Long Day Ends, has died at the age of 77 after a brief period of illness, his representative announced this Saturday.
"I am deeply saddened to announce the death of Terence Davies, who passed away peacefully at home in his sleep, after a brief illness, on Saturday, October 7, 2023," says his agent, John Taylor, in a statement sent to the agency. British PA News.
Born in Liverpool in 1945, into a working-class Catholic family, Davies left school at the age of 16 to work in a transport office and in the 1970s entered the world of cinema. In 1976 he wrote the script for what would be his first short film, Children. It was an autobiographical story about a boy who is bullied by his schoolmates and who finds himself trapped in several family problems that he ended up extending through two more short films, Madonna And Child and Death And Transfiguration, which shaped the Terence Davies Trilogy (1984).
He would then film Distant Voices, a social drama starring Pete Postlethwaite that would establish him internationally by winning the Golden Spike at the Seminci and the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Festival, as well as distinctions in Toronto and the International Critics' Prize at Cannes. The film is also important because it would lay the foundations for the director's personal style, marked by contemplative cinema, where family scenes and popular songs have a great presence.
Davies won the Golden Spike again in 1992 with The Long Day Ends, another autobiographical film about a very sensitive and introverted 12-year-old boy who finds in cinema a way to escape the oppressive environment of school. In The Neon Bible he would work alongside actress Gena Rowlands in a drama based on the novel by John Kennedy Toole. And he featured a cast led by Gillian Anderson, Laura Linney and Dan Aykroyd in the period drama The House of Mirth, an adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel.
In 2011, another literary adaptation was highly applauded, the one he made of Terence Rattigan's work in The Deep Blue Sea, with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston. In 2015 she premiered the melodrama Sunset Song and a year later she would return behind the camera with Story of a Passion, where Cynthia Nixon played the poet Emily Dickinson in a delicate staging that evidenced the exquisite handling of light and composition. of the frames that the British director displayed.
His latest film, Benediction, a biopic of the writer Siegfried Sasson, played by Jack Lowden, earned him the best screenplay award at the San Sebastian Festival in 2021. Davies had planned to bring the adaptation of The Inebriation of Metamorphosis, a novel, to the cinema. by Stefan Zweig, but a sudden illness prevented him from doing so.
