Murray Melvin - The Ken Russell Connection

The Ken Russell Connection

The first Ken Russell film Murray Melvin appeared in was Diary of a Nobody, filmed at the Ealing Studios on a specially built ‘silent film’ set. Alongside Murray Melvin, who played the errant son, Lupin, were other actors from John Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, including Bryan Pringle and Brian Murphy, who also became Russell regulars. Lupin’s girlfriend in the film is played by Vivian Pickles, whose performance at the Royal Court Theatre in John Osborne’s Plays for England had attracted national attention.

Murray Melvin cameoed in the final scenes of Ken Russell’s film of Isadora Duncan (1966), which starred Vivian Pickles as the great American dancer.

Murray Melvin most famous role is Father Mignon in Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). Mignon is the catalyst to the true-life horrors documentated in the film. His appointment to the covent of Loudon, whose leading members were expecting Father Grandier (played by Oliver Reed), causes the nun’s demonic condemnation of Grandier to spiral out of control.

After the film, Melvin directed two operas by The Devils composer, Peter Maxwell-Davies. These were Miss Donnithorn’s Magot and The Martydom of St. Magnus. Further work with Maxwell Davies followed. He was the Performer in the first production of Maxwell-Davies’s Missa Super L’Homme Arme; and he played the Virgin in the first production of Maxwell-Davies’s Notre Dame des Fleur.

In Russell’s The Boy Friend (1971), Murray Melvin, and Theatre Workshop regulars, Brian Murphy and Barbara Windsor, are among the company players trying to catch the eye of a Hollywood producer who watches their provincial performance of Sandy Dennis’s The Boy Friend. In the film, Melvin has a spectacular solo dance number in a caped French officer’s outfit.

He cameoed as Hector Berlioz in Ken Russell’s Lisztomania, as a test-run to a film about Berlioz which Russell was preparing.

He appeared in Russell’s film about the poet, Samuel Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1978).

Returning with the French theme, Murray Melvin played an enthusiastic French lawyer in Prisoner of Honour (1991), Ken Russell’s all-star film about the French Dreyfus Affair.

Murray Melvin remained a lifelong friend of Ken Russell, and was often seen with Russell at festival screening of Russell’s films. At the Barbican screening of the director’s cut of The Devils, 1 May 2011, Murray Melvin and Ken Russell arrived together, with Melvin pushing Ken Russell’s wheelchair. (http://www.barbican.org.uk/film/event-detail.asp?ID=12167)