Career
After leaving school at sixteen, he worked for ten years as a shipping-office clerk and as an unqualified accountant, before leaving Liverpool to attend Coventry Drama School. While there, he wrote the screenplay for what became his first autobiographical short, Children (1976), filmed under the auspices of the BFI Production Board. After this introduction to film-making, Davies went to the National Film School, completing Madonna and Child (1980), a continuation of the story of Davies' alter ego, Robert Tucker, covering his years as a clerk in Liverpool. Three years later, he completed the trilogy with Death and Transfiguration (1983), in which he hypothesizes the circumstances of his death. These works went on to be screened together at film festivals throughout Europe and the U.S. as The Terence Davies Trilogy, winning numerous awards. Davies, who is gay, frequently explores gay themes in his films.
Due to funding difficulties and his refusal to compromise, Davies' output has been comparatively sporadic, with only five feature films released to date. The first two, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, are very autobiographical films set in forties and fifties Liverpool; The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth, are adaptations of novels by John Kennedy Toole and Edith Wharton, respectively. His intended fifth feature, Sunset Song, an adaptation of the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, fell through. Scottish and international backers left the project after the BBC, Channel 4, and the UK Film Council each rejected proposals for final funds. Davies was apparently considering Kirsten Dunst for the lead role before the project was postponed.
He produced two works for radio, A Walk To The Paradise Garden, an original radio play broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2001, and a two-part radio adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2007.
The long interval between films ended with his first documentary Of Time and the City, which was premiered out of competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The work uses vintage newsreel footage, contemporary popular music and a narration by Davies himself as a bittersweet paean to his hometown of Liverpool. It received rave reviews on its premiere.
His most recent work is The Deep Blue Sea. He will direct Uncle Vanya at Wyndham's Theatre in 2013.
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