Terence Davies, ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ director, dead at 77

Terence Davies, an award-winning British director considered among the nation’s greatest, died on Saturday. He was 77.

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Davies’ death was confirmed on his official Instagram page.

“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of Terence Davies, who died peacefully at home after a short illness, today on 7th October 2023,” the post read.

Davies wrote and directed the 1988 film “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” about the lives of a working-class British family in his hometown of Liverpool.

His most recent work, the 2021 Netflix drama “Benediction,” examined the life of war poet Siegfried Sassoon, according to the BBC.

In 2000 Davies adapted Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” The Guardian reported. Eight years later he directed “Of Time and the City,” a documentary about Liverpool, according to the newspaper.

Davies was born on Nov. 10, 1945, the youngest of 10 children, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

He worked as a clerk in a shipping office and as a bookkeeper for an accountant for a decade before enrolling at Coventry Drama School in 1973, the BBC reported.

At the school, Davies wrote the screenplay for “Children,” the first of an autobiographical trilogy that was followed by “Madonna and Child” and “Death and Transfiguration, the entertainment news website reported.

In 2015, Davies directed the drama “Sunset Song,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. The following year he directed “A Quiet Passion.”Davies went on in 2015 to make the intimate drama Sunset Song, a project that took 18 years to find funding. Based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel, it depicts the difficult life of a Scottish farm girl in the early 20th century. The following year, he made the fine-grained biographical portrait A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson.

Davies won the Cannes International Critics Prize in 1988 for “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” according to the BBC.

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