The flamboyance and intemperance of his movies were all the more notable coming at a time when British cinema and television were still largely known for the kitchen-sink style of social realism. During the 1970s, his most active decade as a feature-film director, he made a series of artist biopics and rock operas that his supporters admired for their delirious excesses and that his detractors dismissed as vulgar kitsch.
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was born in Southampton, England, the son of a shoe store owner. He described his childhood as a lonely one, with many an afternoon spent at the movies, alone, or with his mother. As a teenager, he attended nautical school, where he said he had won over the bullies by putting on amateur productions of Dorothy Lamour musicals. He served briefly in the Merchant Navy and the Royal Air Force, then moved to London, where he studied dance before turning to photography in his late 20s.
Mr. Russell’s work as a freelance photographer and filmmaker led in 1959 to a job at the BBC, where he made dozens of arts documentaries, most notably a 1962 piece on English composer Edward Elgar, unusual at the time for its use of reenactments. His other subjects included composers Sergei Prokofiev and Claude Debussy, dancer Isadora Duncan, and painter Henri Rousseau.
The fascination with genius, ambition, and the creative process - and the project of making high culture accessible to a popular audience - continued in Mr. Russell’s later fictional features. Many of them take considerable liberties in exploring the lives and works of composers and artists: the Tchaikovsky biopic “The Music Lovers’’ (1970);’’Savage Messiah’’ (1972), about French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; “Mahler’’ (1974); and “Lisztomania’’ (1975), which imagined Franz Liszt as the original pop superstar.
