Ken Russell is best known in the United States as director of such feature films as Women in Love (1969), The Music Lovers (1970), Tommy (1975), and Altered States (1980). Although his television work is less well known outside the United Kingdom, it has had a major impact on the development of the television genre of fictional history, described by historian C. Vann Woodward as the portrayal of “real historical figures and events, but with the license of the novelist to imagine and invent.” Russell’s special province in the genre (a psycho-biographical form he terms the “biopic”) has been music composers and other artists such as dancers and poets. His imaginative interpretations of the lives of artists have, on occasion, outraged both critics and the general public.

After a brief career as a ballet dancer, and later as a successful commercial photographer, Russell turned his attention to film directing. On the basis of a portfolio of three low-budget short films, he was hired by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1959, at the age of 32, to work as a director on its arts series Monitor. Most of the Monitor pieces (10- to 15-minute short subjects) focused on contemporary artists working in British music, dance, and literature. Russell noted that, at the time, there was no real experimental film school in Britain, except for Monitor. Monitor producer Huw Wheldon, who later became managing director of BBC-TV, encouraged experimentation (within limits), and Russell took full advantage of this.

The two most important productions from Russell’s Monitor period were Elgar (1962) and The Debussy Film (1965). Elgar, Russell’s attempt to counter British music critics’ negative assessments of the British composer Edward Elgar, was his first full-length Monitor film, lasting 50 minutes. It also marked the celebration of the 100th Monitor program. In Elgar, Russell advanced the idea of using actors to impersonate historical characters, which he had introduced the previous year on Monitor in the short film Portrait of a Soviet Composer, on the life of Sergei Prokofiev. Prior to this, the BBC had prohibited the use of actors in the portrayal of historical personages. In the Prokofiev film, Russell used an actor to show the composer’s hands, a so-called anonymous presence. In Elgar, Russell took the concept a step further, allowing Elgar to be seen (but still not heard). Five different actors, mostly amateurs, portrayed the composer at various stages of his life. Most of the scenes with the actors were shot in medium-shot. According to Russell, the viewer was “not aware of a personality; just a figure.” Russell skillfully combined silent footage of the actors, stock footage of English life at the turn of the century, and photographs of Elgar and his family, all of which were enhanced by Elgar’s compositions. Russell focused his interpretation on Elgar’s reverence for the English countryside—his “return to the strength of the hills” (a theme of great importance in Russell’s own life). That theme would reemerge in many subsequent Russell biopics. Elgar was extremely popular with the audience, in large measure because of Russell’s romantic use of Elgar’s music; the show was repeated at least three times. As John Baxter points out, this work launched Russell’s national reputation.

After an unsuccessful feature film, French Dressing, Russell returned to the BBC to direct The Debussy Film: Impressions of the French Composer (1965). Here, Russell broke through the BBC’s last remaining prohibition against using actors in speaking roles in historical drama. According to Russell, as quoted in Gene D. Phillips’s Ken Russell, Wheldon thought the film “a bit esoteric” and insisted on beginning the film “with a series of photographs of Debussy along with a spoken statement assuring viewers they were about to see a film based on incidents in Debussy’s life and incorporating direct quotations from Debussy himself.” The BBC feared that viewers might believe they were watching newsreels of real people. To circumvent this potential problem, Russell created an intriguing “film-within-a-film,” in which the framing story depicts a French film director coming to England to shoot a film on Debussy. In the script, actors were clearly identified as actors playing the various historical figures. Russell, and writer Melvyn Bragg (who would collaborate with Russell on several films and later become the editor and presenter of The South Bank Show), conceived Debussy as “a mysterious, shadowy character”—an unpredictable and sensual dreamer. This is accentuated by Russell’s evocative use of macabre physical comedy.

Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World (1966) is the most celebrated and least factual of Russell’s BBC biopics. The film used a mix of classical music and popular tunes (from Beethoven to “Bye, Bye, Blackbird”) and featured a nude dance, suicide attempts, and wild parties to depict Duncan’s sensa-ional life and her death wish. Excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia were intercut with original footage, Ken Hanke reports, to convey the “ideal of German perfection” Duncan sought to emulate. Duncan was at once “sublime” and “vulgar,” if not grotesque. Interestingly, some of Russell’s more hostile critics have accused the director of the same tendencies.

Song of Summer (BBC, 1968) chronicles the last years of the life of composer Frederick Delius, who, blind and crippled with syphilis, is living in a French village with his wife, Jelka, and his amanuensis, Eric Fenby. Fenby, who advised Russell on the film, is portrayed as a young man who sacrificed his own career out of love and respect for Delius. In the end, according to Russell, as quoted by Phillips, Fenby feels “robbed of his own artistic vision” (see Phillips). The ultimate irony, says Russell, is that much of Delius’s music is second-rate. In Song of Summer, Russell is able to express an understanding and even compassion for a composer whose basic personality and music he clearly dislikes. The theme, evident in Isadora, of what Hanke refers to as “the artist’s unfortunate need to debase himself and his art,” reemerges here. As in Elgar, Russell highlights the artist’s obsession with na-ure. According to Hanke, in Song of Summer, Russell exhibited his “ability to work in a restrained manner if the subject matter calls for it.”

The last film Russell would make for the BBC, the infamous The Dance of the Seven Veils: A Comic Strip in Seven Episodes on the Life of Richard Strauss (1970), exhibited no such restraint. The complete title reveals Russell’s intention to create a satirical political cartoon on the life of the German composer, whom Russell saw as a “self-advertising, vulgar, commercial man . . . [a] crypto-Nazi with the superman complex underneath the facade of the distinguished elderly composer.” Although, according to Russell, “95 percent of what Strauss says in the film he actually did say in his letters and other writings,” many critics and viewers found Russell’s treatment of the venerated composer itself to be vulgar. Hanke’s assessment is that in the film, Russell contends that Strauss “betrayed himself and his art through his lack of personal responsibility,” which included his currying favor with the Nazis during World War II. The most objectionable sequences in the film were Strauss conducting “Der Rosenkavalier,” and exhorting his musicians to play ever louder to drown out the screams of a Jew being tortured in the audience by SS men, who were carving a Star of David on the man’s chest with a knife; and the playing of Strauss’s “Domestic Symphony” over shots of Strauss and his wife making love, their climax being mirrored by the orchestra. The film concludes with Russell himself portraying a wild-haired orchestra conductor bowing and walking away from the camera as his director’s credit appears on the screen (perhaps signaling his own farewell to the BBC). The film aired once, leading to mass protests and questions raised in Parliament. As Russell put it, “all hell broke loose.” Huw Wheldon, head of BBC-TV, defended Russell. At the same time, the BBC tried to placate critics, including Strauss’s family and his publisher, by presenting a roundtable discussion in which music critics and conductors denounced both Russell and the film. By the time The Dance of the Seven Veils aired on the BBC, Russell’s feature film Women in Love had assured him a reputation in feature-film circles, and the BBC experience convinced him it was time to abandon the small screen.

Russell would return to television, but not to the BBC. In 1978, Russell directed Clouds of Glory for British independent television’s Grenada-TV. This program was actually two one-hour episodes. The first, William and Dorothy, was a biopic on the love of William Wordsworth for his sister Dorothy. The second episode, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was a biopic on the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In the 1990s, Russell continued to make television films about composers and music: The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner (1990), The Secret Life of Sir Arnold Bax (1992), The Mystery of Doctor Martinu (1993), Classic Widows (1995), and In Search of the English Folk Song (1997). Other television projects by Russell in this decade included a historical drama about the Dreyfus case, Prisoners of Honor (1991); literary adaptations (the miniseries Lady Chatterley [1993] and Ken Russell’s Treasure Island [1995]), and a prison drama, Dogboys (1998). He also directed a television documentary on Russia and Russians entitled Alice in Russialand (1995), and in 2001 he offered a TV documentary on women soccer players, The Brighton Belles, which aired as part of the BBC 2 series Southern Eye. Russell also remains active as a feature filmmaker and director of operas.