Ken Russell, born Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell, is one of the most controversial directors from Great Britain, famous for his biographies of classical composers and extravagant films. As a teenager he joined the Navy and the Royal Air Force, which he eventually left in order to continue the ballet lessons that he had previously taken for several years. Before deciding on a film career, he briefly engaged in acting and photography. In 1956, he began directing short films and thanks to two of them, Peepshow (1956) and Amelia and the Angel (1959), he got hired by the BBC. He directed many films about artists (especially composers) for Monitor, BBC’s art program. An especially well done feature-documentary was Elgar (1962), a biography of the British composer Edward Elgar, and it was among the first documentaries in which actors were used to portray historical figures instead of photographs and documents. Thanks to this success he directed his feature debut: comedy French Dressing (1963). His second feature film, Billion Dollar Brain (1967), went relatively unnoticed but his next film, an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love (1970), secured him a nomination for an Oscar for Best Director, while Glenda Jackson, in the leading role, won an Oscar for Best Actress. However, along with the awards came his first experience with censorship, thanks to the now legendary scene of wrestling between the naked Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. His biographical film about Tchaikovsky The Music Lovers (1970) was singled out by censors because he focused more on the composer’s sexual life than his career. The real test for the censors came when he made The Devils (1971) in which he criticized the church. The film, for which he wrote the screenplay, was censored and in some countries banned (the distributor Warner Brothers never released the full, director’s version of the film). In that same year he made the musical The Boy Friend (1971) starring Twiggy, and afterwards returned to biographical features: Savage Messiah (1972) about the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeski and Mahler (1974) about the famous composer. His tendency to exaggerate was especially evident in the rock opera Tommy (1975), his commercially most successful film. Then he made Lisztomania (1975) starring Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt - the lead singer of the band The Who who also starred in Tommy; a free adaptation of the biography of Rudolph Valentino, Valentino (1977), starring the famous ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Nevertheless, these films were not as good as his earlier biographies so he directed two films for television and afterwards in American production the sci-fi Altered States (1980) starring William Hurt and Crimes of Passion (1984) starring Kathleen Turner. These two films were not successful so Russell went back to Europe and spent some time directing operas and taking a break from films. In the 1980s, he directed Gothic (1986), The Lair of the White Worm (1988), Salome's Last Dance (1988) and The Rainbow (1989) but his career started to fade and he focused more on TV productions (among the most important TV productions is the TV series Lady Chatterley, 1993) and documentaries about musicians. His last two feature films are the drama Whore (1991) and the musical comedy The Fall of the Louse of Usher: A Gothic Tale for the 21st Century (2002). He wrote several books about making films and the British film industry and six novels: four about the sexual lives of famous composers (Beethoven, Brahms, Elgar and Delius) and two sci-fis.