English Film Director Terence Davies Dead at 77

Palme d’Or nominated film director Terence Davis has died at the age of 77. His death was announced on his social media pages, who explained he died “peacefully at home after a short illness.” The Liverpool-born filmmaker wrote and directed several autobiographical movies, including The Long Day Closes, Of Time and the City, and Distant Voices, Still Lives. The latter earned him several awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, the International Critics’ Award at Toronto International Film Festival, and Best Film and Best Director at the London Film Critics Circle Award. Born in 1945 to a working-class Catholic family in England, Davies drew inspiration from his childhood, especially with the Palme d’Or nominated film The Long Day Closes. Describing the four years between seven and eleven years old as being “sick with happiness,” the film stood in between two important moments in his life: the death of his father and the beginning of boarding school.

More recently, Davies directed Benediction, an “anti-biopic” about British poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden), who became one of the leading poets coming out of World War I. However, his adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, with critical acclaim for its star Rachel Weisz especially, became a powerful film for Davies, honing in on his specificities in period pieces and in his cinematography. While some might call Davies’s life lonely, as he hasn’t had any partners and has lived alone since 1980, he found life to be much happier that way, he told The Guardian in 2022: “I would prefer to be lonely and on my own than to live a life I couldn’t justify to myself.”