Legendary film director Ken Russell has died, aged 84.

A visionary and an innovator in a nation of creative pygmies, Russell’s films were at worst fascinating failures and at best unparalleled works of genius.

He began his film career in the 1950s, making a series of short movies before graduating to television, where he moved from straight documentary production to a series of increasingly artistic and fictionalised biographies of major composers with the likes of Dance of the Seven Veils and Song of Summer: Frederick Delius.

His feature film debut came in 1964 with low-key comedy French Dressing, and he followed this with the spy movie Billion Dollar Brain, before breaking through with the groundbreaking Women in Love in 1969 – noted as the first (mainstream) film to feature male nudity. Russell followed this with the equally impressive The Music Lovers, and would then make The Devils, a film so incendiary that even now, Warner Brothers refuse to allow it to be released uncut.

He followed The Devils with a complete change of pace in musical comedy The Boy Friend, and went on to make Savage Messiah, Mahler, Lisztomania, Valentino and the film version of The Who’s Tommy, proving himself just as comfortable with rock music as with classical.

In 1980, he took over and saved the troubled production of Altered States, but would struggle to find financing for projects after this. His last real mainstream film was Whore, and his other Eighties films are a fascinating collection of oddities: Crimes of Passion, Gothic, Salome’s Last Dance and Lair of the White Worm are all gloriously mad, visually exciting works of excess, while The Rainbow is a highly underrated D.H. Lawrence adaptation, a late follow-up to Women in Love.

Lawrence would also inspire his most significant work of the 1990’s, a 4-part BBC adaptation of Lady Chatterley. During the rest of the decade, Russell couldn’t get film projects off the ground at all, and would only work in television. In 2002, he decided to stop trying to keep track of the whims of mainstream financiers, always happy to hand money to prosaic, tedious ‘realist’ filmmakers but unwilling to support innovation and imagination, and shot The Fall of the Louse of Usher on domestic video equipment with friends and family, releasing the film online and later on DVD, where it bewildered fans and critics alike.

As well as his films, Russell authored an amusing, self-deprecating autobiography and made some great documentaries for The South Bank Show. Oh, and he briefly appeared on Big Brother, rapidly hounded out by the shrieking idiocy of Jade Goody and her horrible family – as apt a metaphor for modern British culture as you could hope for.

That Russell found it such a struggle to find financing for his work for so long is a shocking indictment of the British film industry, and something all involved should feel eternal shame for. A unique talent and cinematic rascal par excellence, he will be very much missed.