Terence Davies, the film-maker regularly hailed by critics as among Britain’s greatest, has died aged 77.
The Liverpool-born director, perhaps best known for his semi-autobiographical study of working-class family life Distant Voices, Still Lives, starring Pete Postlethwaite, was working on a new project at the time of his illness and only two years ago released Benediction, starring Jack Lowden in the role of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Davies was admired for his low-voltage, sensitive approach to presenting real-life drama, allowing actors to register small changes in emotion. Commenting on the trademark lyrical style and themes of his 2015 film Sunset Song, based on the first book of a Scottish trilogy set in the 1930s and by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the film critic Jonathan Romney noted how it echoed the tone of his earlier Liverpudlian family drama from 1988. “The bleakness and the rapture are interwoven to altogether symphonic effect,” wrote Romney. Both films feature a violent father figure, shadows of Davies’s own father, who died when he was seven.
In 2000 Davies adapted Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, which was Bafta nominated, and followed it after an eight year gap with Of Time and the City, an archival documentary about Liverpool. His screen adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s intense stage drama, The Deep Blue Sea, came next in 2011 and in 2016 he cast Cynthia Nixon as his Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion.
Two weeks ago Davies explained some of the thinking behind his directing technique when he was interviewed about a new short film, Passing Time, a three-minute view of Essex. He told the website Film Fest Gent that “most actors, in my view, spend far too much time ‘acting’. No one wants to see someone acting on screen. Actors should feel, not act – otherwise it’s inauthentic.”
The answer, he said, was in casting the right actors: “I meet everyone in person and know instinctively if they are right for the role or not. I can spot the ‘acting’ straight away, and then it’s a polite ‘no thank you’ …
“It is rare that ‘acting’ happens on set but if it does there’s usually a reason – it’s been a long day, they are anxious or you know something’s going on off-set. You have to sense these things. A gentle suggestion to forget what they’ve prepared and ‘just feel your way through’ usually gets us there, and then they do something wonderful I’d never have thought of, and that’s the magic.”
A plan to make a film called The Post Office Girl, announced early this year, had come to grief, Davies admitted, but he had hopes for a new script he was working on for a story to be set in Jamaica.
Speaking from his cottage in Essex last spring, Davies told the Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey that he also values a joke in a film. “Humour is so beguiling,” he said. “Especially when it masks tragedy.”
He explained that, with the exception of a woman with whom he lived in the late 1970s, he had never shared his home with a partner, male or female, or really wanted to do so: “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.”
Gilbey suggested he may in fact have understood things too well. “The one thing I can’t bear now is atmospheres,” Davies said, remembering his father’s long malevolent silences in his early childhood. “I can come into a room full of people and I can tell you who’s had the row. I always say: if I’ve upset you, just come out with it. If you cold-shoulder me, I instantly see him sitting in the corner of the parlour and I’m a seven-year-old again.”
Davies’s manager John Taylor said: “I am deeply saddened to announce the death of Terence Davies, who died peacefully at home in his sleep after a short illness, on Saturday 7 October 2023. Umbra Sumus/And if thou wilt, remember,/And if thou wilt, forget.”
• This article was amended on 10 October 2023. An earlier version said that Terence Davies had never lived with a partner; in fact, in the interview with Ryan Gilbey, he spoke of living with a woman in the 1970s, but how he had then lived alone since 1980.
