Mark Kermode on… the revered British director Terence Davies: ‘He had to fight to get every film made’

Last month, British cinema lost one of its greatest and most distinctive screen poets. From an astonishing trilogy of early short films (; ; – all available on BFI Player)to his final feature, (2021), seamlessly blended personal recollections with wider universal truths. His subjects ranged from autobiographically inspired portraits of postwar working-class life in Liverpool (, 1988, 1992) to sweeping literary adaptations (of John Kennedy Toole’s Georgia-set , 1995, currently streaming on Channel 4; or Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s hardscrabble Scottish masterpiece , 2015) and intimate portraits of real-life authors, most remarkably the American, 2016. Yet each of his films felt deeply, distinctly personal. No wonder Jack Lowden, who played Siegfried Sassoon in , told me that after immersing himself in his subject’s diaries in preparation for the role, he gradually came to realise that “I was essentially playing Terence.”