Ken Loach Biography

MARITAL STATUS
Professions Director , Screenwriter , Actor more
Birth name Kenneth Loach
British nationality
Birth June 17, 1936 (Nuneaton – England)

BIOGRAPHY
Son of an electrical engineer, Ken Loach, a brilliant student, studied law at Oxford after serving two years in the air force. Interested in drama, he began as an actor before becoming assistant director at the Northampton Repertory Theater in 1961. Hired by the BBC as a director of television films in 1963, he already created fictions directly in touch with British society, such as Cathy Come Home . Heroine of these two films, Carol White will also play the main role in Loach’s first feature film for the cinema, No Tears for Joy in 1967, filmed in a realistic style which will be the director’s mark.

Ken Loach enjoyed critical and public success in his country with his second opus , Kes (presented in Cannes, at the Critics’ Week, in 1970), the story of a child who forgets his difficult daily life by taming a falcon, while European moviegoers hail the chilling Family Life (1972). Although he tried his hand at costume films with Black Jack (1978), Ken Loach devoted himself mainly to the small screen during the 1970s – we owe him in particular Days of Hope , a series about the working class, his favorite subject . With the column Regards et Sourires , he entered the race for the Palme d’Or for the first time, even if he had to wait until the 1990s to establish himself as one of the major authors of European cinema.

Lucid and committed, Ken Loach takes a warm look at those left behind in Thatcherite England with works like Riff raff (1991) or Raining stones which earned him the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1993. Surrounded by loyal collaborators (on the screenplay, on production), he offers little-known actors strong characters who overflow with humanity: the combative mother of Ladybird or the alcoholic of My name is Joe – a role which allows Peter Mullan to obtain the Best Actor Award at Cannes in 1998. A citizen on the lookout, this convinced Marxist denounces the privatization of rail in Great Britain ( The Navigators ), the exploitation of workers in Los Angeles ( Bread and roses with Adrien Brody ) and racial prejudices post-September 11 ( Just a kiss ).

A valuable observer of contemporary society (as evidenced by the unforgettable Sweet Sixteen in 2002), Loach also likes to return to significant episodes of recent history: the Nazi regime in Fatherland, the Spanish Civil War in Land and Freedom , the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua in Carla’s song . In 2006, fifteen years after the thriller Hidden Agenda , he plunged back into the Irish conflict with The Wind Rises , a new period film which allowed this dedicated and influential filmmaker to win an award that had long eluded him: the Palme d’Or. gold at the Cannes Film Festival. He then goes from the very dark It’s a Free World (2007), a bitter observation on globalization (Screenplay Prize in Venice in 2007) to the lighter Looking for Eric , presented at Cannes in 2009, in which this great football fan directs French football icon Eric Cantona .

After this detour into social comedy, he returned the following year with Route Irish , which deals with a more serious subject: the growing place of private war companies in today’s conflicts. This film, once again in selection at Cannes, only precedes yet another appearance by the filmmaker on the Croisette, for the Competition presentation of the comedy La Part des Anges in 2012, which follows a group of disadvantaged young people on the whiskey route of Scotland. Two years later, Ken Loach takes us to Ireland, for the historical drama Jimmy’s Hall . This latest feature film retraces the journey of Jimmy Gralton, an Irish communist leader who went into exile in the United States in 1909, before returning to his country and creating a dance hall there in 1921. The film, co-written with Paul Laverty was one of the 2014 Cannes selections.

Two years later, the director won the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival with the social, moving and committed I, Daniel Blake . The feature film centers on the fate of a 59-year-old English carpenter with heart problems but paradoxically forced to work. Three years later, Ken Loach immerses us in the world of precarious delivery workers with Sorry We Missed You , denouncing the excesses of the “Uberization” of this difficult profession. In 2023, the 87-year-old filmmaker delivers the equally committed The Old Oak , which once again deals with the working class of the north-east of England bruised by the excesses of liberalism, but also the theme of refugees.