Becoming Ken Russell: The Authorised Biography of Ken Russell: Volume One (Volume 1)

Using tens of thousands of pages of original documents, decades of letters, and hundreds of interviews with Ken Russell, his family and his colleagues, Paul Sutton’s multi-volume biography of Russell is the most complete portrait of an English film artist. This first volume, Becoming Ken Russell, takes the reader through the years of Russell’s childhood and adolescence, into the years of his career in dance and photography, in which he played a key role in the founding of pop art, and on to an almost day-by-day account of his work in 1959, the year he made seven 35mm films and became Ken Russell. The Seven Ken Russell Films of 1959, on subjects as wide-ranging as the poetry of John Betjeman; the music of Gordon Jacob; the comedy of Spike Milligan; the dance of Marie Rambert; the art of Colquhoun and MacBryde; the surging popularity of the guitar; and a film about Mechanical Instruments, advanced the art of cinema, acted as a sort of ‘training school’ for masters such as Stanley Kubrick, and redefined the meaning of ‘English Cinema’.