Terence Davies, a 77-year-old British director and screenwriter best known for his work on Distant Voices, Still Lives, has passed away.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he gained recognition for a trilogy of movies called Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration.
He was born and reared in Liverpool, and much of his writing is autobiographical.
After a brief illness, he passed away quietly at home, his manager said in a statement.
His most recent project, the Netflix drama Benediction, which starred Doctor Who’s Peter Capaldi and Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden, focused on the life of war poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Chris Guthrie was portrayed by actor Agyness Deyn in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 2015 adaptation of Sunset Song, which is set after the First World War.
Cynthia Nixon, who starred in Sex and the City, portrayed poet Emily Dickinson in Davies’ 2016 film A Quiet Passion.
Prior to attending theater school in Coventry in 1973, Davies spent ten years working as a bookkeeper and a clerk in shipping offices.
For the film Distant Voices, Still Lives, which was based on his memories of life in Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s, he was awarded the Cannes International Critics Prize.
During an episode of the review program Film 2012, hosted by Claudia Winkelman, Davies also talked to the BBC about how the movie was one of his most personal because it was about his family.
A 2000 version of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth starred Gillian Anderson from s3x Education as socialite Lily Bart, while a 2011 adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea starred Rachel Weisz.
