Ken Loach facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Ken Loach
Born	(1936-06-17) 17 June 1936 (age 88) Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England
Education	St Peter's College, Oxford (BA)
Occupation	Film director screenwriter
Years active	1962–present
Political party	Labour (1962–1994, 2015–2021) Left Unity (2012–2015) Respect (2004–2012)
Spouse(s)	Lesley Ashton ​ ​ (m. 1962)​
Children	5, including Jim

Kenneth Charles Loach (born 17 June 1936) is a British film director and screenwriter. His socially critical directing style and socialism are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as poverty (Poor Cow, 1967), homelessness (Cathy Come Home, 1966), and labour rights (Riff-Raff, 1991, and The Navigators, 2001).

Loach's film Kes (1969) was voted the seventh-greatest British film of the 20th century in a poll by the British Film Institute. Two of his films, The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016), received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making him one of only nine filmmakers to win the award twice. Loach also holds the record for most films in the main competition at Cannes, with fifteen films.

Early life

Kenneth Charles Loach was born on 17 June 1936 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the son of Vivien (née Hamlin) and John Loach. He attended King Edward VI Grammar School and at the age of 19 went to serve in the Royal Air Force. He read law at St Peter's College, Oxford and graduated with a third-class degree. As a member of the Oxford University Experimental Theatre Club he directed an open-air production of Bartholomew Fair for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford, in 1959 (when he also took the role of the shady horse-dealer Dan Jordan Knockem). After Oxford, he began a career in the dramatic arts.

Career

Loach worked first as an actor in regional theatre companies and then as a director for BBC Television. His 10 contributions to the BBC's Wednesday Play anthology series include the docudramas Up the Junction (1965), Cathy Come Home (1966) and In Two Minds (1967). They portray working-class people in conflict with the authorities above them. Three of his early plays are believed to be lost. His 1965 play Three Clear Sundays dealt with capital punishment, and was broadcast at a time when the debate was at a height in the United Kingdom. The leading characters in Cathy Come Home, by Jeremy Sandford, are affected by homelessness, unemployment, and the workings of Social Services. In Two Minds, written by David Mercer, concerns a young schizophrenic woman's experiences of the mental health system. Tony Garnett began to work as his producer in this period, a professional connection which would last until the end of the 1970s.

During this period, he also directed the absurdist comedy The End of Arthur's Marriage, about which he later said that he was "the wrong man for the job". Coinciding with his work for The Wednesday Play, Loach began to direct feature films for the cinema, with Poor Cow (1967) and Kes (1969). The latter recounts the story of a troubled boy and his kestrel, and is based on the novel A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines. The film was well received, although the use of Yorkshire dialect throughout the film restricted its distribution, with some American executives at United Artists saying that they would have found a film in Hungarian easier to understand. The British Film Institute named it No 7 in its list of best British films of the twentieth century, published in 1999.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Loach's films were less successful, often suffering from poor distribution, lack of interest and political censorship. His documentary The Save the Children Fund Film (1971) was commissioned by the charity, who subsequently disliked it so much they attempted to have the negative destroyed. It was only screened publicly for the first time on 1 September 2011, at the BFI Southbank. During the 1980s Loach concentrated on television documentaries rather than fiction, and many of these films are now difficult to access as the television companies have not released them on video or DVD. At the end of the 1980s, he directed some television advertisements for Tennent's Lager to earn money.

Days of Hope (1975) is a four part drama for the BBC directed by Loach from scripts by dramatist Jim Allen. The first episode of the series caused considerable controversy in the British media owing to its critical depiction of the military in World War I, and particularly over a scene where conscientious objectors were tied up to stakes outside trenches in view of enemy fire after refusing to obey orders. An ex-serviceman subsequently contacted The Times newspaper with an illustration from the time of a similar scene.

Loach's documentary A Question of Leadership (1981) interviewed members of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (the main trade union for Britain's steel industry) about their 14-week strike in 1980, and recorded much criticism of the union's leadership for conceding over the issues in the strike. Subsequently, Loach made a four-part series named Questions of Leadership which subjected the leadership of other trade unions to similar scrutiny from their members, but this has never been broadcast. Frank Chapple, leader of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union, walked out of the interview and made a complaint to the Independent Broadcasting Authority. A separate complaint was made by Terry Duffy of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union. The series was due to be broadcast during the Trade Union Congress conference in 1983, but Channel 4 decided against broadcasting the series following the complaints. Anthony Hayward claimed in 2004 that the media tycoon Robert Maxwell had put pressure on Central Television's board (Central was the successor to the original production company Associated Television), of which he had become a director, to withdraw Questions of Leadership at the time he was buying the Daily Mirror newspaper and needed the co-operation of union leaders, especially Chapple.

Which Side Are You On? (1985), about the songs and poems of the UK miners' strike, was originally due to be broadcast on The South Bank Show, but was rejected on the grounds that it was too politically unbalanced for an arts show. The documentary was eventually transmitted on Channel 4, but only after it won a prize at an Italian film festival. Three weeks after the end of the strike, the film End of the Battle ... Not the End of the War? was broadcast by Channel 4 in its Diverse Strands series. This film argued that the Conservative Party had planned the destruction of the National Union of Mineworkers' political power from the late 1970s.

In 1989, Loach directed a short documentary Time to go that called for the British Army to be withdrawn from Northern Ireland, which was broadcast in the BBC's Split Screen series.

From the late 1980s, Loach directed theatrical feature films more regularly, a series of films such as Hidden Agenda (1990), dealing with the political troubles in Northern Ireland, Land and Freedom (1995), examining the Republican resistance in the Spanish Civil War, and Carla's Song (1996), which was set partially in Nicaragua. He directed the courtroom drama reconstructions in the docu-film McLibel, concerning McDonald's Restaurants v Morris & Steel, the longest libel trial in English history. Interspersed with political films were more intimate works such as Raining Stones (1993), a working-class drama concerning an unemployed man's efforts to buy a communion dress for his young daughter.

On 28 May 2006, Loach won the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival for his film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a political-historical drama about the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War during the 1920s. Like Hidden Agenda before it, The Wind That Shakes the Barley was criticised by Ruth Dudley Edwards for allegedly being too sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army and Provisional Irish Republican Army, though it would transpire that Edwards had not seen the film. This film was followed by It's a Free World... (2007), a story of one woman's attempt to establish an illegal placement service for migrant workers in London.

Throughout the 2000s, Loach interspersed wider political dramas such as Bread and Roses (2000), which focused on the Los Angeles janitors strike, and Route Irish (2010), set during the Iraq occupation, with smaller examinations of personal relationships. Ae Fond Kiss... (a.k.a. Just a Kiss, 2004) explored an inter-racial love relationship, and Sweet Sixteen (2002) concerns a teenager's relationship with his mother. His most commercial later film is Looking for Eric (2009), featuring a depressed postman's conversations with the ex-Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona appearing as himself. The film won the Magritte Award for Best Co-Production. Although successful in Manchester, the film was a flop in many other cities, especially cities with rival football teams to Manchester United.

The Angels' Share (2012) is centered on a young Scottish troublemaker who is given a final opportunity to stay out of jail. Newcomer Paul Brannigan, then 24, from Glasgow, played the lead role. The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival where Loach won the Jury Prize. Jimmy's Hall (2014) was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Loach announced his retirement from film-making in 2014 but soon after restarted his career following the election of a Conservative government in the UK general election of 2015.

Loach won his second Palme d'Or for I, Daniel Blake (2016). In February 2017, the film was awarded a BAFTA as "Outstanding British Film".

Film style

Loach at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival

In May 2010, Loach referred in an interview to the three films that have influenced him most: Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965) and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966). De Sica's film had a particularly profound effect. He noted: "It made me realise that cinema could be about ordinary people and their dilemmas. It wasn't a film about stars, or riches or absurd adventures".

Throughout his career, some of Loach's films have been shelved for political reasons. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian newspaper he said:

It makes you angry, not on your own behalf, but on behalf of the people whose voices weren't allowed to be heard. When you had trade unions, ordinary people, rank and file, never been on television, never been interviewed, and they're not allowed to be heard, that's scandalous.

Loach argues that working people's struggles are inherently dramatic:

They live life very vividly, and the stakes are very high if you don't have a lot of money to cushion your life. Also, because they're the front line of what we came to call the class war. Either through being workers without work, or through being exploited where they were working. And I guess for a political reason, because we felt, and I still think, that if there is to be change, it will come from below. It won't come from people who have a lot to lose, it will come from people who will have everything to gain.

A thematic consistency throughout his films, whether they examine broad political situations or smaller intimate dramas, is his focus on personal relationships. The sweeping political dramas (Land and Freedom, Bread and Roses, The Wind that Shakes the Barley) examine wider political forces in the context of relationships between family members (Bread and Roses, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Carla's Song), comrades in struggle (Land and Freedom) or close friends (Route Irish). In a 2011 interview for the Financial Times, Loach explains how "The politics are embedded into the characters and the narrative, which is a more sophisticated way of doing it".

Many of Loach's films include a large amount of traditional dialect, such as the Yorkshire dialect in Kes and in The Price of Coal, Cockney in Up the Junction and Poor Cow, Scouse in The Big Flame, Lancashire dialect in Raining Stones, Glaswegian in My Name Is Joe and the dialect of Greenock in Sweet Sixteen. Many of these films have been subtitled when shown in other English-speaking countries. When asked about this in an interview with Cineaste, Loach replied:

If you ask people to speak differently, you lose more than the voice. Everything about them changes. If I asked you not to speak with an American accent, your whole personality would change. That's how you are. My hunch is that it's better to use subtitles than not, even if that limits the films to an art-house circuit.

Feminist writer Julie Bindel has criticised Loach's recent films for a lack of female characters who are not simply love interests for the male characters, although she praised his early film, Cathy Come Home. Bindel also wrote, "Loach appears not to know gay people exist".

Political activities

Affiliations before 2015

Loach first joined the Labour Party from the early 1960s. In the 1980s, he was in the Labour Party because of the presence of "a radical element that was critical of the leadership", but Loach had left the Labour Party by the early to mid-1990s after being a member for 30 years. During the 1960s and 1970s, he was associated with (or a member of) the Socialist Labour League (later the Workers Revolutionary Party), the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers Party or SWP) and the International Marxist Group.

He was involved in Respect - The Unity Coalition from its beginnings in January 2004, and stood for election to the European Parliament on the Respect list in 2004. Loach was elected to the national council of Respect the following November. When Respect split in 2007, Loach identified with Respect Renewal, the faction identified with George Galloway. Later, his connection with Respect ended.

Together with John Pilger and Jemima Khan, Loach was among the six people in court who offered surety for Julian Assange when he was arrested in London on 7 December 2010. The money was forfeited when Assange skipped bail to seek asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador, London.

Loach supported the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition in the 2012 London Assembly election. With the support of the activist Kate Hudson and academic Gilbert Achcar, Loach launched a campaign in March 2013 for a new left-wing party which was founded as Left Unity on 30 November. Left Unity candidates gained an average of 3.2% in the 2014 local elections. Loach gave a press conference during the launch of Left Unity's manifesto for the 2015 general election.

Campaign for boycott of Israel

In a letter sent to The Guardian in 2009, Loach advocated support for the Palestine Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) along with his regular colleagues Paul Laverty (writer) and Rebecca O'Brien (producer).

In 2007, Loach was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter calling on the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival "to honour calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not co-sponsoring events with the Israeli consulate". Loach also joined "54 international figures in the literary and cultural fields" in signing a letter that stated, in part, "celebrating 'Israel at 60' is tantamount to dancing on Palestinian graves to the haunting tune of lingering dispossession and multi-faceted injustice". The letter was published in the International Herald Tribune on 8 May 2008.

In May 2009, organisers of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) returned a £300 grant from the Israeli Embassy to fund Israeli filmmaker Tali Shalom Ezer's travel to Edinburgh after speaking with Loach. He was supporting a boycott of the festival called for by the PACBI campaign. In response, former Channel 4 chief executive Jeremy Isaacs described Loach's intervention as an act of censorship, saying: "They must not allow someone who has no real position, no rock to stand on, to interfere with their programming". Later, a spokesman for the EIFF said that although it had returned £300 to the Israeli Embassy, the festival itself would fund Shalom-Ezer's travel from its own budget. Her film Surrogate (2008) is a comedy set in a clinic which is unconcerned with war or politics. To his critics, Loach added later: "The boycott, as anyone who takes the trouble to investigate knows, is aimed at the Israeli state". Loach said he had a "respectful and reasoned" conversation with event organisers, saying they should not be accepting funds from Israel.

In June 2009, Loach, Laverty and O'Brien withdrew their film Looking For Eric from the Melbourne International Film Festival, where the Israeli Embassy is a sponsor, after the festival declined to withdraw that sponsorship. The festival's chief executive, Richard Moore, compared Loach's tactics to blackmail, stating that "we will not participate in a boycott against the State of Israel, just as we would not contemplate boycotting films from China or other nations involved in difficult long-standing historical disputes". Australian politician Michael Danby also criticised Loach's tactics, stating that "Israelis and Australians have always had a lot in common, including contempt for the irritating British penchant for claiming cultural superiority. Melbourne is a very different place to Londonistan". An article in The Scotsman by Alex Massie noted that Loach had not called for the same boycott of the Cannes Film Festival, where his film was in competition with some Israeli films.

Association with Labour under Jeremy Corbyn

Loach had rejoined the Labour Party by 2017, and was a member until his expulsion in the summer of 2021. In August 2015, he endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership campaign. In September 2016, Loach's one-hour documentary In Conversation with Jeremy Corbyn was released during the second leadership election.

In May 2017, Loach directed an election broadcast featuring a profile of Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party's general election campaign. In all, he has made three broadcasts for the party.

In interviews in September and October 2019, Loach said MPs around Corbyn had not acted as a team, and that most would prefer a rightwing leader. He said the Labour leadership had "compromised too much with the Labour right". He accused the right of the party, including Tom Watson, of aiming to destroy the socialist programme put forward by Corbyn. He suggested that sitting Labour MP's and councillors should reapply for their jobs before each election so that they could be judged on their record. He also said that Labour people should make a case for socialism including "[en]hancing trade union rights, planning the economy, investing in the regions, kicking out the privatised elements of the NHS". He considered issues such as health, schools, poverty, inequality and climate change as more important than Brexit.

In November 2019, Loach endorsed the Labour Party in the 2019 general election. In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, he signed a letter endorsing the Labour Party under Corbyn's leadership in the 2019 general election. The letter stated that "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few."

In August 2021, Loach was expelled from the Labour Party because of his membership of an organisation, Labour Against the Witchhunt, proscribed by the party the previous month, saying he was removed for failing to "disown" Labour members who had been expelled from the party. In an interview with Jacobin the same month, Loach stated that he was not a member of any of the organisations which had recently been proscribed by the party, but that he "support(ed) many of the people who have been expelled, because they are good friends and comrades". He also argued that his expulsion was an ex post facto action as the evidence the party cited in their letter informing him of their decision dated from before the organisations he was accused of being a member of had been banned by the party. Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell said, "To expel such a fine socialist who has done so much to further the cause of socialism is a disgrace". His expulsion was also opposed by the Socialist Campaign Group but supported by the Jewish Labour Movement.

Views on the welfare system

In 2016, Loach, a social campaigner for most of his career, said the criteria for claiming benefits in the UK were "a Kafka-esque, Catch-22 situation designed to frustrate and humiliate the claimant to such an extent that they drop out of the system and stop pursuing their right to ask for support if necessary".

Personal life and honours

Loach lives with his wife, Lesley, in Bath. They have two sons, Jim and Stephen, and two daughters, Hannah and Emma. Another son died in a car accident, aged five. Jim Loach has become a television and film director. Emma is a documentary film maker who is married to the actor Elliot Levey.

Loach is a patron of the British Humanist Association and a secularist, saying "In particular, the indoctrination of children in separate faith schools is pernicious and divisive. I strongly support the British Humanist Association."

Loach turned down an OBE in 1977. In a Radio Times interview, published in March 2001, he said:

It's all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest. I turned down the OBE because it's not a club you want to join when you look at the villains who've got it.

Loach has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Bath, the University of Birmingham, Staffordshire University, and Keele University. Oxford University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in June 2005. He is also an honorary fellow of his alma mater, St Peter's College, Oxford. In May 2006, he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship at the BAFTA TV Awards.

In 2003, Loach received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University and received the 2003 Praemium Imperiale (lit. "World Culture Prize in Memory of His Imperial Highness Prince Takamatsu") in the category Film/Theatre. In 2014, he was presented with the Honorary Golden Bear at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival. The Raindance Film Festival announced in September 2016 that it would be honouring Loach with its inaugural Auteur Award, to recognise his "achievements in filmmaking and contribution to the film industry." He was also made Honorary Associate of London Film School.

Loach was among a number of artists invited by Pope Francis to attend the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Vatican Museums’ Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. The Pope encouraged those present to work for change in areas like social justice.

Turning down Turin Film Festival award

In November 2012, Loach turned down the Turin Film Festival award, upon learning that the National Museum of Cinema in Turin had outsourced cleaning and security services. The museum outsourced this labour after dismissing workers who opposed a wage cut, in addition to raising allegations of intimidation and harassment. Loach publicly stated that his refusal to accept the award from the museum was an act of solidarity with these workers.

Honorary doctorate from Free University of Brussels

In April 2018, Loach was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels).

Filmography

Films

Television

Documentary

Filmmaking awards and recognition

Loach is arguably the most successful director in the history of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Films of his have won the Palme d'Or, the festival's top award, a joint-record twice (The Wind That Shakes the Barley in 2006 and I, Daniel Blake in 2016), the Jury Prize a joint-record three times (Hidden Agenda in 1990, Raining Stones in 1993, and The Angels' Share in 2012) as well as the FIPRESCI Prize three times (Black Jack in 1979, Riff-Raff in 1991 and Land and Freedom in 1995) and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury twice (Land and Freedom in 1995 and Looking for Eric in 2009). Loach's collaborators have also won awards at the festival for their work on his films: Peter Mullan won Best Actor for My Name Is Joe in 1998, and Paul Laverty won Best Screenplay for Sweet Sixteen in 2002.

While Loach's films have only occasionally been entered into the Venice and Berlin Film Festivals (generally regarded as the main rivals of Cannes), he has won awards at both, including, most notably, their respective lifetime achievement awards: the Honorary Golden Lion in 1994, and the Honorary Golden Bear in 2014.

Other major awards won by Loach include the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film (I, Daniel Blake in 2016) and BIFA Award for Best British Independent Film (My Name is Joe in 1998 and Sweet Sixteen in 2002), the Cesar Award for Best Foreign Film (Land and Freedom in 1995 and I, Daniel Blake in 2016), the European Film Award for Best Film (Riff-Raff in 1992 and Land and Freedom in 1995), and the Belgian Film Critics Association Grand Prix (Raining Stones in 1993).

In addition, Loach's 1969 classic Kes was judged the 7th best British film of the 20th century by the British Film Institute, and the 4th best British film ever made by Time Out, while his 1966 television play Cathy Come Home was ranked the second best British TV programme, also by the BFI, and the best ever single television drama in a readers' poll conducted by the Radio Times. Loach's 1997/2005 documentary McLibel, meanwhile, featured in the BFI's landmark Ten Documentaries which Changed the World series.

See also

In Spanish: Ken Loach para niños

• Kitchen sink realism