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Terence Davies, one of Britain’s most lyrical filmmakers, who drew on his upbringing in working-class Liverpool for films including “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” an elliptical portrait of love, longing, memory and faith, died Oct. 7 at his home in Mistley, Essex, in the east of England. He was 77.
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The cause was cancer, said his manager, John Taylor.
Mr. Davies was among the most revered British filmmakers of his generation, an art house poet whose rigorously composed, emotionally charged work reflected his own dreams and torments, including his reckoning with his homosexuality and his abusive, tyrannical father. Across eight features, a documentary and a trilogy of autobiographical shorts, he was known for crafting images that seemed to suggest a Vermeer painting or a family portrait come to life, and for developing an idiosyncratic tone that was by turns nostalgic and grim, wry and unsettling.
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“Davies doesn’t offer a cinema of plot or a cinema of ideas, but a cinema of raw feelings and incandescent moments that wash over you like waves,” film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote in the Chicago Reader.
For Mr. Davies, who turned to music and movies as a refuge when he was a boy, tragedy was often masked by humor, and brutal violence often gave way to joyous singalongs. His first feature-length film, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988), was an autobiographical tapestry of ceremonial moments — funerals, weddings, holiday celebrations — punctuated by acts of cruelty committed by a moody father, played by Pete Postlethwaite, at the head of a large Liverpool family.
The character was a stand-in for Mr. Davies’s own father, whose picture hangs in the family’s parlor. In one scene, he beats his daughter with a broom until the handle snaps; when Postlethwaite questioned whether the violence might be excessive, Mr. Davies handed the actor his sister’s number, according to the Guardian, and said, “Call her.”
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“My father was so psychotic I had to leave a lot out,” he told the Irish Times decades later. “You can’t re-create the terror.”
American critics were mixed on the film, although “Distant Voices” was rapturously received in Britain, where Derek Malcolm of the Guardian wrote that it was “likely to become a small milestone in the emergence of the British cinema to full maturity.” In the Times of London, David Robinson declared that if Mr. Davies “were to make no other films, this one would assure him a secure place in the history of English art.” A 2002 critics poll in Sight and Sound magazine ranked “Distant Voices” the ninth best film of the last 25 years.
Mr. Davies (pronounced “Davis”) said that he made the film “to try to exorcise my ghosts,” and returned to his childhood for his follow-up, “The Long Day Closes” (1992), a sunnier exploration of the four-year period between the death of his father, when Mr. Davies was 7, and his arrival at a Catholic boys’ school, where he said he was beaten daily by bullies. He continued to examine stories of abusive fathers, difficult mothers and shy schoolboys in literary adaptations like “The Neon Bible” (1995) with Gena Rowlands, based on a John Kennedy Toole novel set in the American South.
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“When you mine your own seam, you also destroy it,” he told the Guardian in 2000. “There’s a point where you become repetitive — there’s nothing else to say. My great love is Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ and these were my modest version of the ‘Four Quartets,’ based on the suffering of myself and my own family.”
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Mr. Davies found renewed inspiration from fiction and poetry, often telling stories that centered the inner lives of women. For his Edith Wharton adaptation “The House of Mirth” (2000), he cast Gillian Anderson as Edwardian socialite Lily Bart, saying that he had never seen her in “The X-Files” — the show that launched Anderson to TV stardom — but thought her face was reminiscent of a John Singer Sargent painting. He later directed actresses including Rachel Weisz in “The Deep Blue Sea” (2011), based on a play by Terence Rattigan; Agyness Deyn in “Sunset Song” (2015), from a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon; and Cynthia Nixon in “A Quiet Passion” (2016), about the life of poet Emily Dickinson.
Still, his work remained partly autobiographical, even as his characters ranged across settings and time periods. “When Emily says, ‘I have many faults, there is much to rectify’ — well, that’s me,” he told the Guardian last year, recalling how he still felt guilty for minor childhood outbursts. “I’ve not done anything horrible to anybody,” he added. “But when you follow the rules, it can become destructive. You can end up not liking yourself. And I don’t think I do. I’ve said this a million times but I wish I were someone else. Someone very good-looking and very stupid. Then the world is your oyster.”
The youngest of 10 children, Terence Davies was born in Liverpool on Nov. 10, 1945. Three of his siblings died in infancy. His mother was a machinist, and his father was a truck driver, according to Mr. Davies’s manager; other accounts describe him as a junk dealer. “I had to sleep in the bed he died in,” Mr. Davies recalled. “I still get these very bad nightmares where someone is coming into the room to kill me.”
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Mr. Davies dropped out of school at 15, finding a job as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper. Around that same time he realized he was gay and became racked with guilt, struggling to reconcile his sexuality — which was then criminalized in Britain — with his Catholic faith, which he abandoned at 22. “I prayed until my knees bled,” he told NPR, “and no succor came.”
The movies offered more lasting comfort, especially musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Pajama Game,” which informed his use of music in later films. Their soundtracks often featured a cappella renditions of 1940s and ’50s pop standards; Mr. Davies was the rare Liverpool native to detest the music of the city’s most famous cultural export, the Beatles.
By his early 20s, Mr. Davies was acting in amateur theater productions. He turned toward filmmaking in the early 1970s, after he concluded that he wasn’t handsome enough to make it as a leading man — as he told it, he had the figure of an avocado — and enrolled at the Coventry Drama School, where he wrote the screenplay for his first short film, “Children” (1976).
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The film introduced his alter ego Robert Tucker, a bullied young man grappling with his abusive father and guilt over his homosexuality. Mr. Davies followed the character into adulthood in two black-and-white sequels: “Madonna and Child” (1980), which he completed while studying at the National Film and Television School, and “Death and Transfiguration” (1983). He also featured the character in a novel, “Hallelujah Now” (1984).
In interviews, he spoke bluntly — at times despairingly — about being gay before homosexuality was decriminalized. “Being gay has ruined my life!” he said in 2011. “I hate it. I’ll go to my grave hating it.” He told the Guardian last year that he had lived by himself since 1980 and largely avoided dating. “I’m not that good at life,” he said. “Because of that business of interaction between people and not being able to interpret things properly.”
For all his self-criticism, friends said that he was far from dour. “For anyone who knew Davies himself, the presiding recollection is the infectious joy, the overwhelming pleasure — the childlike delight — that he clearly took in all that he loved,” wrote film critic Michael Koresky, author of the 2014 study “Terence Davies,” in a tribute for the British Film Institute. Eric Stoltz, who played Anderson’s unrequited lover in “The House of Mirth,” once described Mr. Davies as “a Tasmanian devil crossed with Doris Day,” adding, “When he is up, there is no greater joy in the world than being around him.”
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Mr. Davies, who is survived by a brother and sister, struggled at times to fund his movies, spending years trying to put together his adaptation of “Sunset Song,” about a young woman who helps her father run the family farm in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide. Before it went into production, he made radio plays for the BBC and completed the documentary “Of Time and the City” (2008), reflecting on the Liverpool of his youth.
His last film, “Benediction” (2021), examined the life of English poet and World War I veteran Siegfried Sassoon, played by Jack Lowden as a young man and Peter Capaldi in old age. Mr. Davies said he felt drawn to the subject partly because he considered himself an outsider, like Sassoon. At one point in the film, the character says he has been overlooked as a writer, skipped over for awards.
Mr. Davies acknowledged that he sometimes felt the same way. “It would have been nice to be acknowledged by BAFTA,” the British film academy, he said, “but they never have. Then again, there’s also part of me that thinks: Isn’t it just vanity? If a film lives every time it’s seen, that’s the real reward.”
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