the times | Saturday January 1 2022 71
Email: [email protected]at 18 years old, to command,
to be the boss of all those
old politicians, those old
men. She made some
mistakes. They tried to
get rid of her and bully
her. But she was a clever,
gutsy young lady.”
The spectacular result,
starring Emily Blunt and
Rupert Friend, not only
won a slew of awards in-
cluding a costume design
Oscar for Sandy Powell,
but also brought the
director to a much wider
audience. “It did change
my life a lot,” he told the
Montreal Gazette. “I think
I’m still the same guy, but
it opened so many doors
and the opinion of people
around me changed more
than I changed.”
He went on to direct the
triple Oscar-winning Dallas
Buyers Club (2013), based on
the real-life story of Ron
Jean-Marc Vallée, director of The
Young Victoria, and right, with Nicole
Kidman, star of Big Little Lies in 2017
which his Islamic friends held their
faith. After University College School
he went up to Jesus College, Cam-
bridge, in 1964 to study English litera-
ture. There he befriended the future
playwright David Hare, who recalled
that “the moment I heard Humphrey
talking about poetry, it was clear to me
who was truly clever and who was not”.
Despite his aptitude for the subject,
Davies soon surmised that it was not in-
tellectually serious enough, and began
studying Chinese in the afternoons to
give himself more of a challenge. Yet he
still felt dissatisfied, until a Jordanian
woman at a party suggested that he
drop English in favour of Arabic.
He graduated with a first in 1968 and
a year later visited Cairo for the first
time. Studying at the city’s American
University, he came to love
Cairo for the mix of cul-
tures that flowed there
from the mediterra-
nean and the Islamic
world.
He became a
representative of
Oxford University
Press in the Mid-
dle East, travelling
the region in search
of business oppor-
tunities and visiting
Dubai when it was little
more than a fishing port.
He returned to Cairo in 1972
to help prepare a dictionary of
Egyptian Arabic. Quizzing Egyptians
about definitions, he learnt how deli-
cately a translator must carry the
meaning of a word from one language
to another — and knew he would like to
spend his life doing so.
Also working on the dictionary was
Kristina Nelson, an American ethno-
musicologist. They married in 1975 and
moved to America where, in 1981,
Davies received his PhD from the de-
partment of Near Eastern Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley. He
took a teaching job at the University of
Arizona in Tucson, while Kristina took
one at the University of Texas in Austin.
He found academia stifling, however,
claiming that within it he saw “so many
petty quarrels that have destroyed
people’s lives”. Both he and Kristina
itched to return to the Middle East.
With two children in tow, Clare and
James, they went to work for Save the
Children in Gaza in 1983. Davies was the
director of the organisation in the area
and later set up its branch in Tunisia,
where the family lived in the town of
Maktar. Clare and James spent time
scrambling around the Roman ruins
nearby. Davies and Kristina divorced in
2002, but remained close friends. She
and their children survive him, as does
Gassim Hassan, his amanuensis.
Reflecting on his life’s work, Davies
felt that his Arabic fluency offered him a
clear view not only into a culture he
would never otherwise have under-
stood, but also into parts of himself he
would never otherwise have discovered.Humphrey Davies, translator, was born
on April 6, 1947. He died of complications
of pancreatic cancer on November 12,
2021, aged 74novelist and playwright. The marriage
was dissolved in 2006 and he is sur-
vived by their two sons who are also in
the film industry: Alex, who worked on
Big Little Lies, and Émile, who played
the hero Zachary as a young boy in
C.R.A.Z.Y..
Vallée was soon experimenting with
film shorts and in 1993 was named most
promising film-maker at the Rendez-
vous Québec Cinéma awards for Stér-
éotypes, a comédie fantastique inspired
by American classics. His feature-
length debut came with Liste noire
(Black List, 1995), about a high-rent
hooker who specialises in the legal pro-
fession but, after getting busted in the
company of a judge, terrorises the malepopulation of Montreal by waving her
list of clients in court. “I’m a thriller
fan,” he explained when Liste noire was
shown at the 1995 Montreal World Film
Festival. “That was my principal reason
for being interested in this script [by
Sylvain Guy]. I’m also a Hitchcock fan.
I love that genre.”
Its success led Vallée to Los Angeles
where he made a couple of low-budget
films, Los Locos (1997) and Loser Love
(1999), and two television episodes of
The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne
(2000). After his period-drama detour
for The Young Victoria he returned to
the pop-infused magic realism of
C.R.A.Z.Y. with Café de Flore (2011),
which included music by Pink Floyd.
Here, he juxtaposed two parallel sto-
ries: one, the tale of Jacqueline (Vanessa
Paradis), a fiercely protective single
mother of a young boy with Down’s
syndrome in 1960s Paris; the other
about a jet-setting Montreal DJ (Kevin
Parent) who is juggling a new relation-
ship with the woman he believes is his
soulmate with the needs of his two
emotionally bruised daughters and his
devastated former wife.
The critics were less impressed with
Demolition (2015), a comedy starring
Jake Gyllenhaal that turned out to be
Vallée’s final feature film. However, he
returned to form directing the televi-
sion series Sharp Objects (2018), based
on Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, a dark
study of Camille (Amy Adams), a
woman haunted by a past that she
wears all over her body in the form of
self-inflicted scars. He secured the
rights to four Led Zeppelin songs
for the series.
A tall, gaunt figure with per-
manent stubble rather than a
beard, Vallée insisted on
strict conditions when filming.
“On every project I fight for a
number of things,” he told The
Hollywood Reporter two years
ago. “Nine to six. I don’t want to
shoot before 9am. I’m 56. I’m
tired. Yeah, I’m a responsible
film-maker, and we finish at six.
And I fight for a music budget.
This is the nature of storytelling,
putting the music in the centre of
the stories.” Choosing which film
to make was, he added, like
choosing a lifestyle: “Are you
going to be happy waking up in
the morning doing this and serv-
ing it?”Jean-Marc Vallée, OC, film director,
was born on March 9, 1963. He died of
a suspected heart attack on
December 25, 2021, aged 58Humphrey Davies
Prolific scholar and translator of Arabic literature
Humphrey Davies’s first rule of transla-
tion was “only translate what you like”,
and he liked a great deal. As the trans-
lator of more than 30 Arabic books, he
gave English speakers the chance to
enjoy texts ranging from the novels of
the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz to
the memoir of a repentant jihadist,
Khaled al-Berry’s Life is More Beautiful
than Paradise.
He had a fondness for playful, experi-
mental works by Arabic writers who did
not merely reuse European literary
forms but remoulded them or invented
their own. The first text he translated
was Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu
Shaduf Expounded. In this work, the
17th-century Ottoman Egyptian writer
Yusuf al-Shirbini employs the same
parodic form that Vladimir Nabokov
would use three hundred years
later in Pale Fire. It is a
poem, supposedly writ-
ten by a peasant, anno-
tated caustically by a
haughty commen-
tator.
“The mordancy
of the satire, its
slight over-the-
topness, not to
mention his
parody of the com-
mentary genre itself,
hint [that al-Shirbini
had] a rambunctious,
even anarchic personality,”
Davies said. “My test for a book is
‘Would the author be fun to sit in a café
with?’ And the answer in al-Shirbini’s
case is an emphatic yes.”
Davies worked by making three
drafts, waiting a month, then making a
fourth. Whenever he translated the
work of a living author, he would quiz
them thoroughly to make sure he had
understood their intentions correctly.
When translating Gate of the Sun, a
1998 novel by the Lebanese writer Elias
Khoury, he subjected him to a nine-
hour interrogation in a room so hot that
Khoury had to strip down to his under-
shirt. Davies’s translation of the book
won him the 2006 Banipal prize.
He won the prize again in 2010 for his
translation of Yalo, another novel by
Khoury. He was about to journey from
his home in Cairo to London to collect
the prize when protests sprang up that
would soon unseat the Egyptian presi-
dent, Hosni Mubarak. “I could perfectly
well have gone to the airport,” Davies
recalled. “I didn’t leave because I didn’t
want to. This is not an event that, having
lived in Egypt for more than 30 years,
one could possibly want not to witness.”
Humphrey Davies was born in
London in 1947, the third son of John, the
music librarian of the BBC, and Phyllis
(née Corbett), a librarian. The Davieses
held regular soirées of musicians, and
made their home in Muswell Hill a sanc-
tuary for those escaping the devastation
of continental Europe, including the
German actor Arnold Marlé. The confi-
dence with which Davies later ventured
into unfamiliar cultures in part sprang
from that cosmopolitan atmosphere.
He sang in the choir of the local
church with his brother Hugh, to whom
he later said that it was there that he
realised “all religion is bullshit”. That
conviction remained, but it did not stop
him admiring the cadences of the King
James Bible or respecting the esteem in‘I’m like a kid on set,
a kid playing with a huge
toy and having fun’
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fiiféPICTURE PERFECT; JIMMY MORRISON/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCKWoodroof (played by Matthew McCo-
naughey), a Texan electrician with Aids
who uses the 30 days he has left to live
to bring unapproved drugs into the US
to help himself and other patients. “In-
travenous drip in one hand, gun in the
other, he treats the fight against Aids
like a spaghetti western stand-off,” ob-
served The Times of McConaughey’s
humdinger of a performance that was
delivered without a shred of self-pity.
Wild (2014) was another true-life tale
and led to a make-up free Reese With-
erspoon being nominated for an Oscar
for her depiction of Cheryl Strayed, a
heroin addict who writes a bestselling
memoir about her self-imposed forced
march along the lengthy and danger-
ous Pacific Crest Trail. Then came a
move into television with Big Little Lies,
the Emmy award-winning HBO series
based on Liane Moriarty’s darkly
comedic tale of three mothers whose
seemingly perfect lives unravel
to the point of murder, which brought
Hollywood A-listers such as Wither-
spoon and Nicole Kidman to the
small screen.
Vallée, whose work with strong
women attracted favourable comment,
was known for his naturalistic ap-
proach to filming, encouraging actors
to improvise during takes and shooting
scenes using natural light or handheld
cameras. “I’m reacting to what they’re
doing, instead of being active and tell-
ing them, ‘This is what I’ll do with the
camera’,” he explained in an HBO in-
terview. “I love it,” he added. “You know,
I’m like a kid on a set, a kid playing with
a huge toy and having fun.”
Jean-Marc Vallée, who sometimes
used the pseudonym John Mac
McMurphy, was born in Rosemont,
Montreal, in 1963, one of four children
whose father worked at the local radio
station; he is survived by his siblings,
Marie-Josée, Stéphane and Gérald.
He studied film at the francophone
Collège Ahuntsic and at the University
of Montreal before starting his career
making music videos. In 1990 he
married Chantal Cadieux, a CanadianNew year honours
The full list of recipients,
including Joanna Lumley
Pages 72-78