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Terence Davies, a British screenwriter and director known for his poetic, intensely personal films like \u201cDistant Voices, Still Lives\u201d and literary adaptations like \u201cThe House of Mirth,\u201d died on Saturday at his home in the village of Mistley, Essex, on the southwest coast of England. He was 77.<\/p>\n
His manager, John Taylor, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, saying only that Mr. Davies had died after \u201ca short illness.\u201d<\/p>\n
An obituary from the British Film Institute said, \u201cNo one made movies like Davies, who precisely sculpted out of a subjective past, creating films that glided on waves of contemplation and observation.\u201d<\/p>\n
The very specific \u201cDistant Voices, Still Lives\u201d (1988) starred Pete Postlethwaite<\/a> as a violently abusive Liverpool father who terrorizes his wife and children. When the film was rereleased in 2018, The Guardian called it the director\u2019s \u201cearly autobiographical masterpiece<\/a>\u201d and declared it \u201cas gripping as any thriller.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When critics referred to Mr. Davies\u2019s film dramas as musicals, they were only half joking. Songs are sung or heard in his movies just as they are in real life \u2014 at bars, at celebrations, at church and on the radio.<\/p>\n In \u201cDistant Voices,\u201d the townspeople and their children sing \u201cBeer Barrel Polka\u201d in a bomb shelter to distract themselves from the horrors of World War II. Audiences hear \u201cIf You Knew Susie\u201d at a wedding reception, \u201cWhen Irish Eyes Are Smiling\u201d while Mr. Postlethwaite takes a curry comb to a horse and \u201cTaking a Chance on Love\u201d issuing from a radio in the background even during the most brutal scenes.<\/p>\n The film won the International Critics\u2019 Prize at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe House of Mirth<\/a>\u201d (2000), based on Edith Wharton\u2019s 1905 novel, starred Gillian Anderson as the doomed heroine, Lily Bart. Writing in The Village Voice, J. Hoberman called the film \u201cbrilliantly adapted\u201d and Ms. Anderson\u2019s performance \u201cunexpectedly stunning.\u201d<\/p>\n Stephen Holden of The New York Times found the film \u201cfunereally gloomy,\u201d but he had to admit, he wrote, that the story was \u201cso gripping, it almost doesn\u2019t matter how it\u2019s couched.\u201d And The San Francisco Chronicle praised it as \u201csuch a mesmerizing downer.\u201d For all that, it grossed only $5 million worldwide (a little more than $9 million in today\u2019s currency).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The industry eventually forgave him for his commercial limitations and continued to back his films, including \u201cThe Deep Blue Sea\u201d (2011), starring Rachel Weisz, which was based on Terence Rattigan\u2019s 1952 play about a judge\u2019s wife having an emotionally destructive affair.<\/p>\n It was not a blockbuster either, but critics were generally admiring<\/a>. A review in New York magazine noted Mr. Davies\u2019s \u201cability to blend the particular with the iconic, to turn ordinary moments into something almost mythical.\u201d<\/p>\n Terence Davies was born on Nov. 10, 1945, in Liverpool, England, the youngest of 10 children in a working-class family.<\/p>\n When Terence was 7, his father died of cancer. He grew up in his mother\u2019s Roman Catholic faith but developed doubts and rejected religion completely when he was 22.<\/p>\n \u201cThen I realized it\u2019s a lie,\u201d he recalled in an interview with The New Yorker<\/a> in 2017. \u201cMen in frocks \u2014 nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He was still a student when he began work on his first short film, \u201cChildren\u201d (1976), later edited into \u201cThe Terence Davies Trilogy\u201d (1983).<\/p>\n The next half-century or so brought Mr. Davies<\/a> awards, film festival attention and a prestigious list of credits.<\/p>\n He did \u201cThe Long Day Closes\u201d<\/a> (1992), a young gay man\u2019s battle with the church, his family and his own guilt; \u201cThe Neon Bible\u201d<\/a> (1995), starring Gena Rowlands, based on John Kennedy Toole\u2019s novel, set in the American South; the documentary \u201cOf Time and the City\u201d (2008), a history of and reflection on his hometown, Liverpool (a \u201clovely, astringent film,\u201d A.O. Scott wrote<\/a> in The Times); and \u201cSunset Song<\/a>\u201d (2015), starring Agyness Deyn, based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon\u2019s novel about coming of age in early 1900s Scotland.<\/p>\n Finally, Mr. Davies<\/a>, who always said that he was drawn to the past, began to explore the lives of the poets themselves.<\/p>\n He made \u201cA Quiet Passion\u201d<\/a> (2016), in which Cynthia Nixon portrays Emily Dickinson, the reclusive 19th-century American poet. The Times\u2019s critic found that Mr. Davies possessed \u201ca poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His last film was \u201cBenediction<\/a>\u201d (2021), a drama about the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. The New Yorker called it \u201can energizing and inspiring movie about the vanity of existence itself.\u201c<\/p>\n Mr. 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.<\/p>\n Lamenting the age of complete license \u2014 in the arts as well as in daily life, he told L.A. Weekly<\/a> in 2012: \u201cThe first thing that goes is subtlety. The first thing that goes is any kind of restraint or even wit sometimes. I don\u2019t know how to deal with that in the modern world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n