Women & Men: Stories of Seduction

Henry Kenneth Alfred "Ken" Russell was an English film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style. He attracted criticism as being obsessed with sexuality and the church. His films often dealt with the lives of famous composers or... were based on other works of art which he adapted loosely. Russell began directing for the BBC, where he made creative adaptations of composers' lives which were unusual for the time. He also directed many feature films independently and for studios. He is best known for his Oscar-winning film Women in Love , The Devils , The Who's Tommy , and the science fiction film Altered States . Classical musicians and conductors held him in high regard for his story-driven biopics of various composers, most famously Elgar, Delius, Liszt, Mahler and Tchaikovsky. British film critic Mark Kermode speaking in 2006, and attempting to sum up the director's achievement, called Russell, "somebody who proved that British cinema didn't have to be about kitchen-sink realism—it could be every bit as flamboyant as Fellini.
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Cecil Antonio "Tony" Richardson was an English theatre and film director and producer. Richardson was born in Shipley, Yorkshire in 1928, the son of Elsie Evans and Clarence Albert Richardson, a chemist. He was Head Boy at Ashville College, Harrogate and attended Wadham College, Oxford, where his... contemporaries included Kenneth Tynan, Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. He had the unprecedented distinction of being elected President of both the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Experimental Theatre Club , in addition to being theatre critic for the university magazine Isis. In 1955, in his directing début, Richardson produced Jean Giraudoux's The Apollo of Bellac for Television with Denholm Elliott and Natasha Parry in the main roles. Representative of the British "New Wave" of directors, he developed the ideas that led to the formation of the English Stage Company, along with his close friend George Goetschius and George Devine. He directed John Osborne's seminal play Look Back in Anger at the Court, writing both the theatre and playwright into British theatrical history.
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Frederic Michael Raphael is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter, and also a prolific novelist and journalist. Raphael was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Irene Rose and Cedric Michael Raphael, an employee of the Shell Oil Co. With his parents, he emigrated to Putney, England, in... 1938. Raphael was educated at two independent schools, Copthorne Preparatory School, near Crawley in West Sussex, and Charterhouse School in Godalming in Surrey, and then at St John's College at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge. Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd directed by John Schlesinger. His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times.
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