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Russell started out directing TV documentaries before making the step up to movies,his first feature film was French Dressing in 1964. His next feature made in 1967 was Billion Dollar Brain with Michael Caine reprising his role as Harry Palmer,a British secret agent.

Trailer for Billion Dollar Brain

His 1969 film Women In Love is the film that confirmed Russell as a director of note and established the Russell style.

The battle of the sexes and relationships among the elite of Britian’s industrial Midlands in the 1920s. Gerald Crich and Rupert Berkin are best friends who fall in love with a pair of sisters Gudrun, a sculptress and Ursula Brangwen, a schoolteacher. Rupert marries Ursula, Gerald begins a love affair with Gudrun, and the foursome embarks upon a Swiss honeymoon. But the relationships take markedly different directions, as Russell explores the nature of commitment and love. Rupert and Ursula learn to give themselves to each other; the more withdrawn Gerald cannot, finally, connect with the demanding and challenging Gudrun

Source: IMDB

The film based on a D. H. Lawrence novel was nominated for many Oscars with Glenda Jackson taking home the Oscar for best actress in her role as Gudrun Brangwen. Russell was also nominated for best director but he didn’t win.

Its most notorious scene had Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling naked,which at the time was heavily cut before it could be shown in cinemas.

Russell went onto direct many more films including,The Music Lovers,The Devils and Tommy.

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The Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney has died from cancer aged 71 (25th November 1939 – 20 November 2011) .

Shelagh Delaney was only 19 when she wrote her most famous work ,A taste of honey,which was later made into a film and starred Rita Tushingham.

An interview with Shelagh in 1959 discussing A taste of honey.

Shelagh Delaney’s Salford

Morrissey was very influenced by Shelagh and used many of her film lines in his songs,she was also the face of The Smiths LP Louder Than Bombs as well as popping up in poster form in the video “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” the below is a tribute to Shelagh.

A genuine poet has passed through the world. Shelagh Delaney exercised a wide influence with the shock of plain language, and shafts of satiric wit, into a severe and donnish 1950s world where working-class people had thus far been assumed to be simplistic, flag-waving cannon-fodder. Her writing was a magnificent confession of life as it was commonly lived in her hometown of Salford, with all of its carefully preserved monotony. She was attacked for immorality, which, then as now, is proof that you have hit on something.

‘A Taste of Honey’ was a sentiment that had not been expressed before its time – far more real than life. It was the Salford of sagging roofs, rag and bone men, walk-up flats, derelict sites, rear-entrance buses, and life in tight circumstances.
Shelagh Delaney did not become fat with success, or become a celebrity, because she was of richer intellect.

She has always been a part of my life as a perfect example of how to get up and get out and do it. If you worry about respect you don’t get it. Shelagh Delaney had it and didn’t seem to notice it.

MORRISSEY
Los Angeles, November 2011.

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