British film director Ken Russell, whose movies are known for their provocative content, died Sunday after suffering a series of strokes, his family confirmed Monday. Russell was 84.
“My father died peacefully… He died with a smile on his face,” Alex Verney-Elliot said.
Russell began his career as a freelance photographer and filmmaker. In 1959, he landed a job making documentaries with BBC. Russell later moved to movies, making some of the most provocative films of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Some of his most controversial work includes “Women In Love,” which is known for an extended scene in which full frontal nudity is show of Oliver Reed and Alan Bates; and the TV movie “The Dance of the Seven Veils: A Comic Strip In Seven Episodes,” a film with portrayed German composer Richard Strauss as a Nazi. The movie contained a scene in which Strauss conducts Rosenkavalier waltzes while SS officers torture a Jew. The Strauss family had the movie banned worldwide. Russell’s other work includes “Tommy,” “Dante’s Inferno” and “The Devil.”
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