Background
Loach, Kenneth was born on June 17, 1936 in Nuneaton, England. Son of John Loach.
Loach, Kenneth was born on June 17, 1936 in Nuneaton, England. Son of John Loach.
He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School and went on to study law at St Peter's College, Oxford.
Loach has remained steadfastly attentive to working-class experience—to such an extent that some of his films have had (or needed) “English” subtitles when released in America. He read law at Oxford and was active in experimental theatre at the same time. He did a little acting, before he joined the BBC and learned his craft on the excellent series Z-Cars, about police in the northwest of England. From there, he began to make docudramas, often with unknown actors and an air of improvisation, but just as often dependent on published source material.
Up the Junction may have seemed like a raw slice of south London life, but it came from a book by Nell Dunn. Cathy Come Home was a good deal tougher and better organized, and it caused great controversy in Britain as to whether or not the BBC should have revealed such harsh social conditions. Poor Cow was an attempt to carry the TV method over into a feature film, but it was less effective (perhaps because it used such excellent but conventional young actors as Terence Stamp and Malcolm McDowell).
In those early days, Loach worked in partnership with the producer Tony Garnett: Kes was their major film, about a working-class kid who tries to raise a falcon—it is probably still Loach’s best-known film. Family Life was a very bleak work, written by David Mercer, about a nineteen- year-old woman whose failure in life leads to her being institutionalized and actually going crazy. The movie seemed as gloomy about mental health care as about the maddening pressures of the family—true to life, perhaps, but without redemption.
For the next few years. Loach had a hard time finding films. The Gamekeeper was a more conventional narrative, about the barriers of the class system. But Loach seemed less himself in traditional narrative. Gradually in the eighties, with varying degrees of success (perhaps because of his comfort with different writers), he worked his way back to tough, exploratory pictures about a more-or-less beleaguered working class. Hidden Agenda—set and filmed in Northern Ireland—is the most accessible of these, though its structure is awkward and the film requires a good deal of background knowledge in the viewer.
But Loach has persevered, and in Ri ff-Raff and Raining Stones he did his best work yet. These are still unforced, naturalistic movies, studies in banal and “hopeless" poverty, but well acted and with growing humor. It is easier to respect Loach than enjoy him: he seldom has the bite of Alan Clarke, for instance. But in his dedication and seriousness, he is an exemplary figure.
Even in the insane prosperity of the nineties, Loach pursued his destiny, and he grew gentler, subtler, and funnier. It was one of the most impressive developments in a filmmaker. Who else—with Bread and Roses—would get to make a film about the Los Angeles janitors’ strike that was a serious contender for prizes at Cannes? Land and Freedom was a remarkable recreation of the Spanish Civil War (with violence, boredom, and the interminable political arguments)—spoiled by a trite, didactic framework. Carla’s Song brought together a Scotsman and a woman from Nicaragua—Loach has a nice, shy taste for Latin women. And best of all, My Name Is Joe followed a romance between a drunk (Peter Mullan) and a social worker.
Married Lesley Ashton, 1962. 5 children (1 deceased).