Terence Davies

Terence Davies (10 November 1945 – 7 October 2023) was a British screenwriter, film director, and novelist. He is best known as the writer and director of autobiographical films, including Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992) and the collage film Of Time and the City (2008), as well as the literary adaptations The Neon Bible (1995), The House of Mirth (2000), The Deep Blue Sea (2011), and Sunset Song (2015). His final two feature films were centered around influential literary figures, Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016) and Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (2021). Davies was widely hailed by critics as one of the greatest British directors of his creative period. Early years Terence Davies was born in Kensington, Liverpool, on 10 November 1945, as the youngest of ten children of working-class Catholic parents. Though he was raised Catholic by his deeply religious mother, at the age of 22 he rejected religion and considered himself an atheist. Davies's father, whom Davies remembered as "psychotic", died of cancer when Davies was seven years old. He recalled the period from then until he entered boarding school, at the age of 11, as the four happiest years of his life. After leaving school at 16, Davies worked for ten years as a shipping office clerk and as an unqualified accountant before leaving Liverpool in 1971 to attend Coventry Drama School. Career