Ken Loach - Life and Career

Life and Career

Loach was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the son of Vivien (née Hamlin) and John Loach. He attended King Edward VI Grammar School and following two years in the Royal Air Force read law at St Peter's College, Oxford. There he performed in the now well-established comedy group, the Oxford Revue. He initially worked as an assistant director at Northampton repertory theatre (now known as Royal & Derngate), but in the early 1960s moved into television direction and was credited in this role on early episodes of Z-Cars in 1964.

Loach's ten 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). The first two portray working-class people with the leading characters in Cathy being affected by homelessness, unemployment, and the workings of Social Services. Tony Garnett began to work as his producer in this period, a professional connection which would last until the end of the 1970s.

Coinciding with his work for The Wednesday Play, Loach began to direct feature films for the cinema, with Poor Cow (1967) and Kes (1970). The later 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 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 '80s, 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. In fact, it was only screened publicly for the first time on 1 September 2011, at the BFI Southbank.

In 1982, Loach and Central Independent Television were commissioned by Channel 4 to make Questions of Leadership, a documentary series on the response of the British trade union movement to the challenge posed by the policies of the Thatcher government, which trade union members an opportunity to call their own leaders to account. The programmes were not broadcast by Channel 4, a decision Loach claimed was politically motivated. In 2004 Anthony Hayward's book Which Side Are You On? Ken Loach and His Films. claims that the media tycoon Robert Maxwell had put pressure on Central's board, 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 Frank Chapple of the electricians.

Which Side Are You On? (1985), about the songs and poems of the UK miners' strike, was commissioned by ITV's The South Bank Show, but also withdrawn from transmission. The film was eventually transmitted on Channel 4, but only after it won a major prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The late 1980s and 1990s saw the production of a series of critically acclaimed films such as Hidden Agenda, one of the rare films dealing with the political troubles in Northern Ireland, Carla's Song set partially in Nicaragua, and Land and Freedom examining the Republican resistance in the Spanish Civil War. "Land and Freedom" contains a quintessentially Loach sequence of a 12 minute political discussion amongst villagers trying to decide whether or not a village's smallholdings should be collectivized. During this period he was also awarded prizes at the Cannes Film Festival on three occasions. He directed the Courtroom Drama reconstructions in the docu-film McLibel, concerning the longest libel trial in English history, which became a promotional disaster for the fast food chain. Interspersed with overtly political films were smaller dramas such as Raining Stones 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 film about the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War during the 1920s. In characteristic fashion this sweeping political-historical drama was followed by It's a Free World a story of one woman's attempt to establish an illegal placement service for migrant workers in London. Throughout the 2000s Loach continued to intersperse wider political dramas such as Bread and Roses (which focused on the Los Angeles janitors strike) and Route Irish (set in the Iraq occupation) with smaller examinations of personal relationships. Ae Fond Kiss explored an inter-racial love affair, Sweet Sixteen a teenager's relationship with his mother, and My Name is Joe an alcoholic's struggle to stay sober. His most commercially successful recent film is 2009's Looking for Eric, featuring a depressed postman's conversations with the ex-Manchester United football star, Eric Cantona (played by Cantona himself). A measure of Loach's difficulties gaining broad release for his work is the fact that this film ended up making only £12,000 profit. The film received critical acclaim and won the Magritte Award for Best Co-Production.

In 2011 he released Route Irish, an examination of private contractors working in the Iraqi occupation. 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".

Loach lives with his wife, Lesley, in Bath, where he is a supporter of and shareholder in Bath City F.C. A short film concerning Bath FC is part of the DVD issue of "Looking for Eric". His son Jim Loach has also become a television and film director.

His most recent film The Angel's Share centres around a young Scottish troublemaker who is given one final opportunity to stay out of jail. Newcomer Paul Brannigan, 24, from Glasgow, plays the lead role. The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival where Loach won the Jury Prize.