Terence Davies was born in 1945, in Liverpool, and was the youngest child among ten siblings in a poor working class, Catholic family of Irish origins (three of the children died prematurely). His childhood was affected by the violence of his sadistic father and the rascals from the gymnasium, who – according to Davies’ words – intimidated and punched him every day for the whole four years. After his father’s death, the director-to-be developed a very intimate relationships with his family, which – together with the cinema discovered at the age of seven and the ever-present Catholic religion – became for him an escape and refuge from the unfriendly, external reality. Discovering his homosexuality resulted in an internal conflict and inexpressible feeling of guilt in the boy.

After finishing his education, fifteen-year-old Terence started to work as a clerk in a port office; he soon changed the office for another one; and this was like a curse for him for many of the next years. The hatred for office work was so overwhelming that in the evenings Davies tried his hand at literature and participated in amateur theatre workshops. Before the age of thirty, he managed to get into a drama school, which he attended for 2 years. In 1972, the British Film Institute gave eight thousand, five hundred pounds (this was quite a big amount) for shooting of the scenario of Children – the film which became Davies’ directorial debut and was finally premiered in 1976. After completing his acting education, and one unsuccessful attempt to be admitted to the studies in film direction, Davies finally managed to get into the National Film School in London. During the next years – up to 1992 – the director was creating his autobiographical cycle, and then he made (until today) only two feature films, which were adaptations of somebody else's texts: The Neon Bible (1994), based on a novel by John Kennedy Toole, and The House of Mirth (2000), based on Edith Wharton’s novel bearing the same title. During this year’s Cannes festival, his first documentary - Of Time and the City (2008), about his home city of Liverpool – was presented.