Terence Davies, British Filmmaker of Working-Class Life, Dies at 77
British author and director Terence Davies, known for films including Distant Voices and Still Lives, has died at the age of 77.
Davies is best known for his autobiographical films, including Distant Voices, Still Lives, and The Long Day Closes, as well as his adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, starring Gillian Anderson.
Davies was born in Liverpool, England, in 1945. He was the youngest of ten children in a working-class Catholic family. Davies’ father was angry and abused and died of cancer when he was small.
When his movie Sunset Song came out in 2016, the director told NPR that his life got better after that. But he still had a hard time figuring out how to balance his Christian training with the fact that he was gay.
“I have a great deal of difficulty in forgiving things that have been done to you in the past that have damaged you,” he said. “And in the end you have to be able to forgive, otherwise you’re always chained to the past.”
Davies has been making movies for more than 40 years, and many critics have given them good reviews. Sight & Sound, a British film magazine, named his personal debut, “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” one of the top ten movies made in the last 25 years in 2002. He was also a fan of the French director Jean-Luc Godard.
But Davies had a hard time getting his movies made because he wasn’t part of the big Hollywood structure.
Davies told NPR’s Scott Simon in 2022, when his movie Benediction came out, “The business is built around making money and stars.” “How can you compete with a film that costs $40 million?”
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