WHEN a female journalist met Ken Russell at his London home some years ago, she was not disappointed by the experience. The living room was dominated by several large, and very nude, pictures of the current Mrs Russell, the largest and most graphic of which the former bad boy of British film sat beneath for the duration of the interview.
A Ken Russell house is a lot like a Ken Russell movie, with his predilection for shock value neurotic-erotica, the bizarre, the gothic and the overwrought. But this most complex of directors also wholeheartedly embraces English touchstones such as El
gar and Lake District landscapes. This strange combination of old-fashioned quaintness and his dark love of the perverse made him an obvious - if ambitious - choice of recruit for the makers of Celebrity Big Brother.
Admittedly, fans of Roman amphitheatre don't often volunteer to fight the lions, but Russell was game, tottering onto the stage on the opening night to announce that he would win by impersonating the last winner, Tourettes sufferer Pete; he then entered the house, screaming "wankers" to the crowd.
Snowy-haired, red-faced, and with the girth of a Space Hopper, British cinema's dotty old uncle initially perplexed the rest of the house. "Ken? You're not Ken Dodd, are you?" inquired Donny Tourette, a punk-lite, amiably.
"I'm an old English film director," the 79-year-old illuminated and by the end of the first hour, he had outraged the delicate sensibilities of deposed Miss Great Britain Danielle Lloyd by removing his underpants within her view.
"I'm not sleeping next to him," hissed S Club singer Jo O'Meara. This turned out to be a wise decision as Ken has since kept the house awake with his snoring.
Like the Big Brother inmates, there must be a generation with no clue who Russell is. His work eluded the zeitgeist and is rarely shown today; it took Big Brother to rouse Channel 4 into screening Russell's first and most famous film, Women In Love.
It was a reminder of the 1970s, when films like The Music Lovers, Tommy, The Devils and Mahler caused outrage with phallus maypole dances, crazed orgiastic nuns and a charbroiled Oliver Reed. But Russell has not made a full-length feature in almost 20 years, and it's been even longer since he was regarded as the enfant terrible of British cinema.
The son of a shoe salesman, Russell was brought up in Southampton and by the age of 12, during the Second World War, he had his own projector on which he screened a collection of German Expressionist films to his family. Proceeds from entrance fees went to the Spitfire fund, but no one seemed to catch the irony of his war effort. A lack of irony is another Russell hallmark. At 15 he joined the navy but was invalided out after a nervous breakdown. An amateur film, Amelia And The Angel, got him a meeting with Huw Weldon, editor of the celebrated BBC arts show Monitor. Russell's biopics of Elgar and Delius struck a chord and crossing into film was a natural next step.
In the old days, he provoked a visceral response. British censors removed a scene from The Devils in which naked nuns fall upon a crucifix sexually, but what remained so enraged film critic Alexander Walker that he hit Russell over the head with a rolled up Evening Standard. Women In Love still retains its landmark status for the nude wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates.
Back then, Russell could make Oliver Stone look like Merchant-Ivory and his unforgettably florid images provided critics with plenty to love and hate in the man dubbed "the chief defiler of celebrities of the past and present" by New Yorker writer Pauline Kael.
His biggest hit followed in 1980, when he tried working within the American studio system for Altered States, in which William Hurt's scientist takes psychedelic drugs to return himself to a more primitive state. Russell admitted trying drugs in the name of research while making the film.
Accused of ruining operas, falsifying history and demolishing the reputations of the greats, from DH Lawrence and Mahler to Debussy, his biopics were always entertaining tempests of excessive everything and optimistic casting - Rudolph Nureyev as Rudolph Valentino, Richard Chamberlain as Tchaikovsky, Roger Daltry as Franz Liszt. Such choices suggest either an adventurous spirit or a casting process involving a copy of the Equity directory, a blindfold and a pin.
By the time he made Lady Chatterley for the BBC in 1993, he was fast verging on the parodic, and the series was his last success, outraging Lawrence devotees and pulling in big audiences.
Crucially now he seems to be out of kilter with popular taste. Two years ago, he heckled Little Britain duo David Walliams and Matt Lucas at an awards ceremony. "You'll never get a third series," he sniped, incorrectly.
Married four times with eight children, he says the financial burden of alimony has left him penniless, so Celebrity Big Brother may be the act of a desperate man. "In the old days United Artists used to say to me 'what film do you want to do?' Back then it was a family-run business with three people at the top. Now there are 300 people who all have to say yes. And the films they say yes to are not my cup of tea."
After 80 films and TV works, Russell and studios parted company as his output declined to a mix of soft porn for German TV, commercials and a documentary on folk songs. Yet he refuses to give up on film, just as he retains an Epicurean zest for life.
Three years ago he posted an ad on his fansite: "Unbankable film director Ken Russell seeks soulmate. Must be mad about music, movie and Moet & Chandon Champagne." After this was relayed on an American TV show, he received thousands of replies, including a millionairess publisher who sent pictures of herself stripping. But the lucky winner of Russell's hand in marriage was 54-year-old Lisi Tribble, who has encouraged him to continue making movies... although these have been home-made affairs shot in his garden such as Brave Tart Versus The Loch Ness Monster, with Mrs Russell starring as the Tart and Ken as the Monster.
The ageism and snickering he has encountered on Celebrity BB is repellent but probably a response he's used to, and one suspects he has his eye on a bigger prize than being the last housemate standing - in particular, making it clear that this one-time exemplum of exhibitionism and excess is alive and kicking.
Russell has had heart trouble and in 2000 suffered a stroke, and the best financial return he may be hoping for is that his appearance will revive interest in his career through DVD rentals and sales of his earlier films. That said, perhaps he has a bigger goal. "You will never hear me say I've made my last film," he declared recently. "The only place that sentence will appear is on my gravestone."
CV
19
59 Russell is hired by the BBC to work on arts magazine programme Monitor.
1969 Women In Love is released. His third film, it effectively launches him as a director.
1993 Ken Russell's Lady Chatterley draws huge audiences with Sean Bean, Joely Richardson and Russell himself in lead roles.
2006 A fire destroys Russell's New Forest cottage and 60 years of handwritten film scripts and projects.
