Silvio Narizzano

Georgy Girl, with Lynn Redgrave as Georgina and James Mason as her admirer, directed by Silvio Narizzano. 

The film and TV director Silvio Narizzano, who has died aged 84, handled several genres throughout his career, including black comedies, period pieces, social dramas, action thrillers and horror movies. But one picture, his swinging London romantic comedy Georgy Girl (1966), stands out from the rest of his eclectic filmography.
Georgy Girl was part of the trend in which British cinema shifted the focus from provincial life and back to the metropolis, celebrating new freedoms and social possibilities. Narizzano, influenced by the French New Wave and his chic contemporaries Richard Lester, John Schlesinger and Tony Richardson, explored such "shocking" subjects as abortion, illegitimacy, adultery and sexual promiscuity with a light touch. The film, which took its cue from the jaunty title song by the Seekers, had superb performances from Lynn Redgrave as the virginal and plain Georgina; Charlotte Rampling as her sexy and amoral flatmate, made pregnant by her charming, laidback boyfriend (Alan Bates); and James Mason as a wealthy businessman who takes more than a fatherly interest in Georgy. The film was nominated for four Oscars, for best actress (Redgrave), supporting actor (Mason), cinematography (Kenneth Higgins) and original song. Narizzano was nominated for a Bafta for best British film and a Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival.
The son of an Italian-American family, Narizzano was born in Montreal and educated at Bishop's University in Quebec. After graduation, he joined the Mountain Playhouse in Montreal. The theatre was run by Joy Thompson, a leading figure in English-language theatre in Quebec and a great influence on Narizzano. He then joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, working as an assistant to Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller and Ted Kotcheff. Soon after co-directing a documentary about Tyrone Guthrie, the artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Narizzano came to Britain to work in television.

Narizzano's first feature was the Hammer horror film Fanatic.

  He rapidly reached the top as a director, gaining plaudits for his work on ITV Television Playhouse (1956-60), a series of Saki tales (1962) and ITV Play of the Week (1956-63), all with superb casts and writers. He directed JB Priestley's anti-nuclear play Doomsday for Dyson (1958); an episode of the BBC series On Trial, starring Micheál MacLiammóir as Oscar Wilde (1960); and 24 Hours in a Woman's Life (1961), starring Ingrid Bergman and adapted by John Mortimer from Stefan Zweig's novel.
Narizzano's feature debut was Fanatic (1965), a Hammer horror film notable for being Tallulah Bankhead's last movie (and her first in 20 years). She plays a crazed religious fanatic who keeps her dead son's fiancee (Stefanie Powers) prisoner, hoping to "cleanse" and then kill her so that she can marry the dead son in heaven. Narizzano managed to coax a venomous performance out of Bankhead, who was intoxicated throughout the shoot. After being shown the film with a small audience of her friends, Bankhead, who is seen in many harsh, unflattering close-ups, announced: "Darlings, I must apologise for looking older than God's wet nurse."
The triumph of Georgy Girl was followed by Blue (1968), a plodding western starring Terence Stamp, which opened to withering reviews but, surprisingly, remained Narizzano's favourite film. Loot (1970), a pointless reworking of Joe Orton's mordant play by the comedy TV writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and directed at a rapid pace, was only marginally better received.
Narizzano was more at ease with Why Shoot the Teacher? (1977), a feelgood adaptation of a novel set in Saskatchewan in the mid-1930s. Then it was back to British television with William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba (1977), fluidly directed on an elaborate studio set, starring Laurence Olivier and Joanne Woodward. In contrast, Staying On (1980), Julian Mitchell's adaptation of Paul Scott's novel, was shot for Granada Television in Simla, India, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.
From the mid-60s, Narizzano lived with his longtime companion, the writer Win Wells, in Mojácar in Andalusia, Spain, as well as keeping a house in London. Wells co-wrote the screenplay of Narizzano's Bloodbath (1979), a weird straight-to-video horror movie, shot in Mojácar, starring Dennis Hopper as the leader of a group of degenerate Americans terrorised by locals for their indulgence in drugs and sex.
After directing a Miss Marple mystery, The Body in the Library (1984), for the BBC, Narizzano's work began to tail off. Since his 30s, he had suffered from bouts of depression which became more serious and prolonged after the death of Wells in 1983. He found some comfort at a Buddhist retreat in Chislehurst, south-east London, and later through a Bible study group in Greenwich, where he lived a semi-reclusive life. He is survived by two sisters and a brother.

• Silvio Narizzano, film and television director, born 8 February 1927; died 26 July 2011

Evelyn Kuypers

Evelyn and Henk Kuypers during the second world war. They both followed the allied liberators into the Netherlands

Towards the end of the second world war, my aunt and godmother, Evelyn Kuypers, who has died aged 92, gave herself a special mission as she drove through the newly liberated Netherlands – to visit her in-laws for the first time and introduce herself.
As a truck driver with the VHK, the Dutch women's voluntary corps, she had followed the liberating troops from Ostend, through Belgium and into the Netherlands, giving first aid and food to the many refugees. She had switched to the VHK from the Dutch Red Cross in an attempt to stay near to her husband, Henricus "Henk" Kuypers, a paymaster with the Dutch war office, who was also with the support troops. Although she spoke no Dutch, she managed to track down her in-laws' home, where she was overjoyed to find that Henk was there to greet her.
Their marriage in Congleton, Cheshire, in 1942 was the start of a globetrotting life for Evelyn (nee Ogden), who hailed from the village of Mow Cop, on the Cheshire-Staffordshire border. She had met Henk the previous year when Dutch servicemen regrouped in Congleton following the Nazi invasion.
After their marriage, they moved to London with his unit until, in 1944, Evelyn's VHK party set sail from Tilbury for Ostend, only to be prevented from landing by severe storms. Lying off the coast, they then lost an anchor and were drifting towards a mined area when the captain decided to return to England. A week later the vessel successfully landed at Ostend.
In 1946 Henk was posted to the Dutch embassy in London. The couple lived in South Kensington for 10 years and had two daughters, Elizabeth and Patricia. Henk's career then took the family to Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Karachi, Edmonton, New York and Bombay (now Mumbai), where he retired as consul-general.
While the family moved around the world, the vivacious Evelyn worked for Catholic charities and schools at each posting. On Henk's retirement in 1978, they settled in St Margaret's Bay, near Dover, where Evelyn immediately declared that she was neither ready nor willing to start taking it easy and, almost until the end of her life, was a staunch volunteer worker for the National Trust, the local Pines gardens and museum, the village charity shop and meals on wheels.
Henk died almost exactly a year before her. She leaves her daughters and four grandchildren.

Dan Peek

Peek composed Don’t Cross the River. 

The songwriting ability and vocal harmonies of the bassist Dan Peek, who has died aged 60, were an integral part of the success of the soft-rock band America. Between 1971 and 1977, the year he quit for a solo career, Peek and his bandmates, Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley, scored an impressive run of hit singles and albums, mostly in their native US. The biggest of these was their debut single, A Horse With No Name, which made the top three on both sides of the Atlantic and instantly earmarked them as the new Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Like his fellow band members, Peek was the son of a US military serviceman and his early years were peripatetic. Born in Florida, he had already lived in Greenland, South Carolina and Japan before the age of 10. The frequent travel meant long journeys on the US highway, where Peek first began singing three-part harmonies with his brother Tom and sister Debbie. By the time his father transferred to an army base in West Ruislip, Middlesex, in 1967, Peek had also become a proficient guitarist and piano player.
It was while attending London Central high school (for the children of US service personnel) in Bushey that he met Bunnell and Beckley. "We really hit it off as friends long before we became bandmates," Peek said.  "We immediately bonded as we were all obsessed with music. "Eventually I joined Gerry and two of his mates in a band called the Daze." In 1969 Peek left for a brief spell at university in the US, and Bunnell took his place in the fledgling group.
On his return they became a trio, fired by the acoustic Americanisms of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. They were still broke though, and for a time were forced to rehearse in Bunnell's car. "From the summer of 1970 until our first album was released in 1972, we rehearsed four hours or more per day," explained Peek. "Dewey's Morris Minor was actually a great space to practice, as it had an immediacy and closeness that helped in really hearing the intricate harmonies and guitar licks we were fine-tuning."
The band secured early gigs at hippy hangouts in London such as Middle Earth and the Roundhouse, before landing a contract with Warner Brothers. While scouting for a record deal, Peek and Bunnell were still employed as dishwashers at the base cafeteria. "There was an 'Americana' brand jukebox there that we played constantly," said Peek. "Somehow the connection between its music and our quest for a name dovetailed. I pushed for keeping it simple and direct, hence America."
A Horse With No Name, issued in December 1971, was an immediate success. Their smooth harmonies and readily accessible folk-rock sound chimed with the times, as did the hirsute wholesomeness of their image. Their first album, America, was a colossal hit too, reaching No 1 in their homeland, chalking up more than a million sales and earning them a Grammy for best new artist. Their follow-up, Homecoming (1972), which featured Peek's first great composition, Don't Cross the River, was only marginally less popular.
For their fourth album, Holiday (1974), the band drafted in George Martin as producer, who helped frame their songs in clever arrangements and give them a glossy studio punch. Lonely People released in December, became Peek's signature tune and made the US top five. A year later America scored their second US No 1 with Beckley's Sister Golden Hair.
But all was not as ripple-free as the music suggested. Tensions had long been part of the band's dynamic. "All three of us were enormously competitive and it was a high-stakes game we were playing," admitted Peek. "And what had once been an all-for-one camaraderie evaporated. It could get pretty ugly." Peek's increasing drug dependency was also becoming a problem. "I was taking hash, marijuana, cocaine, quaaludes, alcohol and tobacco. …There was a certain amount of naivety regarding drug use in the 60s and 70s. In retrospect I sincerely wish I'd been a teetotaller." He left the group by mutual consent in the summer of 1977.
Peek duly set about overhauling his life. He vowed to kick his addictions and renewed his faith in Christianity. His debut solo single, All Things Are Possible, issued on Pat Boone's Lamb & Lion label in 1979, became one of Christian rock's first big crossover hits, while Bunnell and Beckley contributed to the album of the same name. But despite the occasional on-stage reunion over the next couple of decades, America remained a duo.
By the 1990s Peek had more or less retired from the music circus, preferring instead to record at home in the Cayman Islands. Later years yielded an autobiography, An American Band (2004), and a steady trickle of albums, mostly released via his website. The most recent was All American Boy in 2007.
He is survived by his wife, Catherine.

• Dan Peek, guitarist, singer and songwriter, born 1 November 1950; died 24 July 2011

Pat Evans

 

Pat Evans helped revolutionise the farming industry, motivated by feeding the world’s fast-growing population.

Pat Evans, who has died aged 89, was one of the generation of post-second world war farmers motivated by the vision of feeding the world's fast-growing population. They believed that farming communities, and the industry itself, could shake off their stifling traditions and build a new future.
This new mood eventually became manifest in a worldwide network of farmers known as the Farmers' Dialogue, which Pat and others launched in 1994. Its aim is to promote shared values for the land, the environment, forestry and family life. Pat firmly believed that there is a common language, and often a shared way of looking at the world, between people who work the soil wherever they come from, not least through their religions. He spelt out his wide-ranging ideas in two books, Farming for Ever (1996) and A Hand to the Plough (2006).
After graduating in agriculture from Cambridge in 1943, Pat served in the Ministry of Agriculture. Then he gained experience on farms in Britain and France, where he formed enduring links, before returning to his family's land at Whitbourne in Herefordshire.
Not everything went according to plan. Pat made an abortive foray into a heavily oil-dependent grass-drying system. But despite agricultural surpluses and low prices, he and many others like him did indeed lay the basis for today's modern farming industry. In 1961 the BBC filmed his new pig unit – considered revolutionary at a time when modern units, purpose-built for large numbers of pigs to be managed with minimum labour, were still a rarity.
His ability to combine the hard work of running a farm while being in constant touch with farmers in other countries brought him an extraordinary range of international contacts. The Farmers' Dialogue, which he was able to develop after his retirement in 1988, grew out of this. He took part in Farmers' Dialogues in Thailand, Cambodia, India, Poland and the US as well as visiting Ukraine, Kenya, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Pat also wrote poems, some of which were published. He lived at Whitbourne for most of his life until moving to a nursing home in Bromyard in 2009. He is survived by his wife, Kristin, whom he married in 1962.

Amy Winehouse found dead aged 27 in London home

Amy Winehouse has been found dead in her London house at the age of 27. 

Singer Amy Winehouse has been found dead at her house in north London She was 27. The award-winning artist, famous for hits including Rehab from the critically acclaimed album Back to Black, was discovered by police in the late afternoon. Her death was being treated on Saturday night as "unexplained" but sources said she had died of a drugs overdose.
The Metropolitan police said: "We were called by London Ambulance Service to an address in Camden Square shortly before 16.05hrs following reports of a woman found deceased. On arrival officers found the body of a 27-year-old female who was pronounced dead at the scene."
Winehouse was last seen with her goddaughter, Dionne Bromfield, earlier last week when the teenager performed at the iTunes festival.
Tributes began to pour in to one of the most celebrated and troubled British artists of recent times. Mark Ronson, who produced Back to Black, said: "She was my musical soulmate and like a sister to me. This is one of the saddest days of my life."
Singer and actress Kelly Osbourne wrote: "i cant even breath right now, im crying so hard i just lost 1 of my best friends. i love you forever Amy & will never forget the real you!"
Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood dedicated his show on Absolute Radio and the reunion performance by his former group the Faces in Hurtwood, Surrey, to Winehouse. "It's a very sad loss of a very good friend I spent many great times with," he said.
Two regulars at Winehouse's local pub, The Hawley Arms in Camden, paid tribute. "Some people might think it shows disrespect to come out drinking tonight but she was such a part of Camden she made it her home and she always got involved," said Mary Gallagher. "Amy even worked behind the bar here. She was such a lovely person and, to be honest, I don't think fame agreed with her. She was an ordinary girl at heart."
Gloria Woods, 26, who works for a record label, said: "There will never be another voice like that in our generation."
A spokesman for the late singer said: "Everyone involved with Amy is shocked and devastated. Our thoughts are with her family and friends."
Winehouse's father, Mitch, returned from New York, where he had been due to perform at the Blue Note jazz club. He said: 'I'm coming home. I have to be with Amy. I can't crack up for her sake. My family need me."
Flowers, teddy bears and candles were left outside her home in Camden Square. One card read: "You will not be forgotten by Camden. We all love you and will continue to love you. Your legend lives on."
Winehouse had suffered a well-publicised battle with drink and drug abuse that saw her withdraw from all of her scheduled performances last month after a series of erratic performances. She started her 12-leg European tour in Belgrade but was booed off the stage after appearing to forget her lyrics. She then pulled out of performances in Istanbul and Athens before she cancelled the tour as fears for her health grew.
A statement released by her spokesman at the time said that she would be given "as long as it takes" to recover. "Everyone involved wishes to do everything they can to help her return to her best," it read.
Winehouse rose to fame with her debut album Frank in 2003, which was feted by music critics in the UK and nominated for the Mercury music prize, but it was her 2006 follow-up album, Back to Black, that catapulted her to stardom and led to five Grammy awards. The album became the third-highest selling album of the 2000s.

Jean Hartley

Jean Hartley reads from Philip Larkin’s Hull and East Yorkshire in 1995.

Jean Hartley was half of the tiny firm that published the first mature book of poems by the best poet of the age. Philip Larkin's The Less Deceived was brought out in 1955 by the Marvell Press, run by Jean, who has died aged 78, and her husband, George, from their two-up, two-down house in Hessle, on the outskirts of Hull. The book instantly made Larkin's reputation.
A few years earlier, the Hartleys had started the literary magazine Listen on the proceeds of Jean's accumulated child allowance. She was the "business manager", which meant that she did most of the work while George was out and about scouting for "contacts". The Marvell Press was so named partly because of the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell's connection with Hull, partly because they realised it would be a marvel if the thing worked.
It did work, and Jean herself was a remarkable woman. She was born in the heart of Hull's fishing community. Her father, Billy Holland, was a foundry worker. In the early months of the second world war, Jean was briefly evacuated to North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. She went on to win a scholarship to Thoresby high school, in Hull, and found, at the age of 14, that she had to choose one of the three vocational courses offered. She chose "commercial", but left after only a year. Her first job was as a shorthand typist with a small firm of accountants, where she was paid £1 a week.
She already had a hunger for serious reading, and spent part of her first week's wages on a book of poems by Edith Sitwell. It "did not stand the test of time. I was more selective thereafter." At the age of 17, dallying with a boy called Peter, who purported to be a poet, she became pregnant. Jean was sent to a strict but kindly Anglican home for unmarried mothers. When she returned to Hull, she took up with an earlier bohemian acquaintance, George Hartley, who was now a shoe salesman. He courted her with flowers stolen from local gardens. Before long, pregnant again, she married George.
In her memoir, Philip Larkin, The Marvell Press and Me (1989), Jean observed: "Hindsight tells me I should have been reading Dr Marie Stopes rather than Ernest Dowson." But she and George got the first issue of Listen out at the same time that Jean's second daughter was born.
The magazine began to thrive ("critically at any rate"), with a range of contributors that broadly represented what was collectively labelled "The Movement" – Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, John Wain, and also, in almost every issue, Larkin. There followed The Less Deceived, first published with a list of 120 subscribers. (The current dealers' value of this book is about £500.) Jean was busy packing copies, rushing to the post office, keeping a house and family, while George went back to the local art college.
By 1967, George had acquired a teaching certificate and was teaching at a local boys' school. Jean decided to pack in her secretarial job, and take some O- and A-levels. Soon she was encouraged to apply for university. Feeling too embarrassed to ask Larkin for a reference, she consulted him over whether she should try Richard Hoggart (who, much earlier, had taught her on some Workers' Educational Association courses) or CB Cox, to which he replied: "Why not let me do one for you? I've known you long enough. Of course you'll need an UCCA form. UCCA! God's gift to limerick writers." Jean was touched that Larkin came round after she had taken each of the three A-level English literature papers, to see how she had done and talk about the questions.
By the summer of 1968, Jean found that life with George had become unendurable, so she moved out with the girls. They found an attic flat, where they lived for three years while Jean was an undergraduate. At the beginning of this course, Larkin told her: "I expect you'll be hard-up living on a grant. I opened a book account for my niece when she went to university. Why don't I do the same for you?"
Jean did well at Hull University and, after graduating in 1972, was accepted to read for a BPhil degree. Needing money while studying, she managed to get a job teaching English in "a smart, purpose-built girls comprehensive" – her old school, Thoresby, rebuilt and now called Amy Johnson school, after the Hull aviator. Later she taught at the local college of education.
After Larkin's death in 1985, Jean was instrumental in setting up the Philip Larkin Society, and for a time edited its journal, About Larkin. She had warm relationships with several women who had been close to Larkin: Ruth Siverns (nee Bowman), Winifred Dawson (nee Arnott) and Maeve Brennan. In 1995 she published the very useful guide Philip Larkin's Hull and East Yorkshire. She was also a gifted painter and potter.
In 2010 Hartley's memoir was reissued by Faber Finds and Hull Truck theatre presented a stage adaptation, Wrong Beginnings, by David Pattison, as part of the events commemorating the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death. Earlier this year Hartley was awarded an honorary DLitt by Hull University, in response to which she said, of herself and her fellow mature students: "We all learned, like the hairdresser heroine of Educating Rita, that we too could sing a different tune."
After her separation from George, Jean never received any money from The Less Deceived. In her last years and final illness she was fortunate to have the love and support of her daughters, Alison and Laurien, and her granddaughter, Sarah, who survive her.

• Jean Hartley, publisher and writer, born 27 April 1933; died 18 July 2011

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud with Martin Gayford in 2010. 

The original, unnerving, sustained artistic achievement of Lucian Freud, who has died aged 88, had at its heart a wilful, restless personality, fired by his intelligence and attentiveness and his suspicion of method, never wanting to risk doing the same thing twice. The sexually loaded, penetrating gaze was part of his weaponry, but his art addressed the lives of individuals, whether life models or royalty, with delicacy and disturbing corporeality.
Freud had a reputation for pushing subjects to an extreme. But unlike the American painters to emerge in the 1950s, his approach was in the western tradition of working from life and brought about with painstaking slowness, rather than unleashed virtuosity. Photographs taken in the studio by his assistant, model and good friend, the painter David Dawson, show Freud working from a roughly sketched charcoal form, the paint slowly spreading outwards from the head. Some canvases were extended, others abandoned while still a fragment.
Portraits of his maturity drew comparisons with equally shocking works by Courbet, Titian and Picasso, the feelings exposed registering as both brash and profound. The recorded stages of Ria, Naked Portrait 2006–07, his last large female nude, indicate the suspenseful build-up of pigment on her toe and the radiator; heavy incretions represent her curls and flushed face.
By 1987, the critic Robert Hughes nominated Freud as the greatest living realist painter, and after the death of Francis Bacon five years later, the sobriquet could be taken as a commendation, or it could imply an honour fit for an anachronistic "figurative" artist working in London. Art critics since Freud's first shows in the 1940s have had difficulties situating his achievement; the common solution has been to apply adjectives to the painted subjects in a way that reflects little more than personal taste, the writers telling readers whether the person portrayed was bored or intimidated, scrawny or obese, the paint slathered, crumbly or miraculously plastic.
Others, however, eschew this moralising tone and are prepared to be startled. Aidan Dunne, for example, reviewing the exhibition in Dublin in 2007, recognised how a single blonde model, "unmistakably" herself, in 1966 led Freud to push "the bounds of decorum in terms of mainstream depictions of the human body considered not as a generic type but as, to use his own term, a "naked portrait". Freud painted three versions of this fine-boned young woman on a cream cover, seen from above, each one a masterpiece. Her pictorial availability seems to some degree predicated on the artist's subtle way of incorporating in his paint strokes the upheavals and new perils that would enliven traditional gender relationships.
Freud was born in Berlin, to Ernst Freud, an architect and Sigmund's youngest son, and Lucie Brasch. The family lived near the Tiergarten, with summers spent on the estate of Freud's maternal grandfather, a grain merchant, or at their summer house on the Baltic island of Hiddensee.
Realising the Nazi threat to Jews, his parents, Lucian and his brothers – Stephen and Clement – moved to England in the summer of 1933. At Dartington Hall, Devon, and then Bryanston, Dorset, the boy was preoccupied by horses and art rather than the classroom. He enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, in January 1939 but found the laid-back atmosphere repellent and rarely attended classes.
From 1939 to 1942 he spent periods at the unstructured school founded by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines in East Anglia, first in Dedham, Essex, and then at Hadleigh, Suffolk. Morris proved a sympathetic mentor, one whose confidence and application gave Freud a sense of what it might mean to be an artist. In March 1941 Freud signed on as an ordinary seaman on the armed merchant cruiser SS Baltrover, bound for Nova Scotia. The ship came under attack from air and then by submarine, and on the return journey he went down with tonsillitis.
By the age of 18, the charismatic, talented young man with a famous name had attracted friends such as Stephen Spender and the wealthy collector and patron Peter Watson. Freud began visiting Paris, first in 1946 while on his way to Greece, where he stayed for six months, and again in 1947, with Kitty Garman, niece of his previous girlfriend Lorna Wishart, daughter of Jacob Epstein and the subject of one of the first major paintings, Girl in a Dark Jacket 1947. His connections in Paris extended to people linked to the arts in the 1930s, such as the hostess and collector Marie-Laure de Noailles.
The handful of surviving postcards contain no mention of postwar deprivations as he offers Méraud Guinness Guevara witty accounts of the installation of André Breton's surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1947, designed by Marcel Duchamp and Frederick Kiesler, and thanks for her hospitality in Provence. Freud expresses admiration for the "malevolence" the French showed to foreigners.
On familiar terms with Alberto Giacometti and Balthus, and, to some degree, Picasso, one senses that the young Freud was marked for life by seeing how single-mindedly, and self-critically, these already famous artists pushed forward their art. When he moved in 1943 to Delamere Terrace on the Grand Union canal, the first of five addresses in Paddington, London, several of his Irish working-class neighbours became models, especially the brothers Charlie and Billy. A large picture with a spiky palm tree and a tense, young Eastender, Harry Diamond, comprises a poignant drama about survival, Interior in Paddington 1951.
Paintings of Freud's two wives – Garman (whom he married in 1948 and divorced four years later) and Caroline Blackwood (whom he married in 1953 and divorced in 1957) – and other intimate friends are filled with suspense and pain, apparent in the strands of hair and a hand raised to the cheek as much as the wide eyes. The pearly skin of these subjects becomes more translucent and the detail extra-perfect. In an article written in 1950, the critic and curator David Sylvester questioned the perversity of feeling in Freud's latest portrayals. "It is impossible to say whether this indicates the incipient decline of an art whose talent flowered remarkably early or simply that every new departure implies growing-pains."
By the time of the Venice Biennale in 1954 – Freud shared the British pavilion with Bacon and Ben Nicholson – the question of prodigy versus an ultimately significant artist was being argued regularly. Freud's only involvement with the art colleges came though accepting William Coldstream's invitation to join the new staff at the Slade in 1949 (he made occasional appearances in the studios until 1954).
It became convenient to account for shifts in Freud's work by focusing on his early reliance on drawing and to cite the influence of painters from northern Europe such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Albrecht Dürer, or even to suggest a false comparison with the Neue Sachlichkeit painters (active in Germany in the 1920s but unknown to the young Freud) and overlook others as relevant as Paul Cézanne and Chaim Soutine. The significance of the change from sable to hogs' hair brush and flake white to Kremnitz white in the late 1950s was exaggerated. Freud was attracted to Bacon's merciless wit and risk-taking, admiring his impulsive handling of paint, yet curiously it was Bacon who tried repeatedly to fix an image of his younger friend's physical magnetism.
By the end of the 1950s Freud's fraught personal life contributed to a visual restlessness, and he began standing to paint, letting the raked perspective exaggerate the anatomies of his subjects. A greenish-yellow palette and vein-marked skin made the subjects, such as Woman Smiling 1958-59, superficially less attractive; the paintings exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1958 and 1963 were harder to sell.
Freud's obsession with gambling on horses and dogs brought on debts and dangerous threats, although many of the most singular paintings are of fleshly men within the racing fraternity. The journalist Jeffrey Bernard, describing Freud's afternoons in the betting shop and evenings with the rich and distinguished (including "Princess Margaret's set"), wrote admiringly: "He has cracked the nut of how to conduct a double life." The artist's slightly leering face and naked shoulders appear between the fronds of a giant Deremensis, Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening 1967–68. A superb, dangerously over-worked, standing self-portrait, Painter Working, Reflection 1993 portrays the ageing artist wearing only unlaced boots, holding a palette and knife (he was left-handed), addressing the viewer like a silent actor; invariably paint applied imaginatively to the planes of walls and floor reads as though a leitmotif for the prevailing mood. Each millimetre, he insisted, had to become essential to the whole.
In the 1980s the bodies of the nudes pressed into the surrounding space, their three-dimensionality and almost modelled impasto describing deeply contoured forms like those within Freud's favourite bronzes by Rodin – Naked Balzac and Iris. Freud spoke of his curiosity about "the insides and undersides of things".
The reserved Bella Freud placed diagonally on a red sofa (1986) is one of the artist's masterpieces. Leigh Bowery and Freud had a mutually sustaining friendship that went on until just before the performance artist succumbed to an Aids-related illness at the end of 1994. Bowery's "wonderfully buoyant bulk was an instrument I felt I could use in my painting"; "yet it's the quality of his mind that makes me want to portray him". In front of Titian's Diana and Actaeon in 2008, he explained: "When something is really convincing, I don't think about how it was done, I think about the effect on me."
Several paintings approach allegory revisited as parody, beginning with Large Interior, W9 1973 (his mother and his lover), and the heavily promoted Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) 1981–83, with its awkward (and memorable) conjunction of five people from the artist's intimate life. Sitters sometimes came separately, as with Evening in the Studio, where the model Sue Tilley sprawls on the floor in the pose of seaside postcards with captions such as "Roll over Betty". The shuttered interior in Freud's house in Notting Hill was recorded in several large paintings, one now in a Dallas museum: a long-time friend, Francis Wyndham, sits reading in the foreground, whippet at his feet, and in the space beyond, a hybrid Jerry Hall/David Dawson nurses her son.
Annabel Mullen was painted with her shaggy-haired dog Rattler and reappears seven years later with a pregnant belly in Expecting the Fourth 2005 (only 10x15cm), and in a larger etching, limbs still like a thoroughbred, as described by one of Freud's favourite authors, Baudelaire: "vainly have time and love sunk their teeth into her".
Freud's exceptional ability to convey tactile information is evident in early drawings, especially those of gorse sprigs, a dead heron and a bearded Christian Bérard in a dressing gown. A similarly heightened, highly poetic, sensibility invades the etchings that began in the 1980s, black whorls and stippled textures fanatically worked, the artist relishing the "element of danger and mystery" that accompanies slipping a heavily worked plate into acid.
International exposure increased after the 1974 Hayward exhibition, nurtured by Freud's admirers, particularly William Feaver, curator of the Tate retrospective in 2002, and the dealer James Kirkman. The revival of interest in painting that emerged around 1980 led to outstanding British artists being ringfenced with an inappropriate label, the School of London. Freud thought his close friend Frank Auerbach the best British painter of his lifetime. Auerbach understood how no original concept or idiom could be credited with the mesmerising reality of art: "I think of Lucian's attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter, he would come off the tightrope. He has no safety net of manner."
A retrospective organised by the British Council reached Washington, Paris, London and Berlin in 1987–88, and the "recent work" exhibition created by the Whitechapel Gallery in 1993 drew crowds in New York and Madrid as well as the East End. Freud's representative from 1993, William Acquavella, had a buoyant, unwavering reckoning of the artist's worth – in others words in the league of 20th-century masters. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised an exhibition with great impact, titled The Painter's Etchings, Freud's place in postwar art history admitted through a side-door rather than placed in the canon.
The completion of a single picture turned into a newsworthy event. In 1993 a Daily Mail front-page headline asked: "Is this man the greatest lover in Britain?" A disconcerting recent painting, the artist working while "surprised by a naked admirer", fed readers' curiosity about the octogenarian's love life. The rather sensational Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) achieved a record auction price for a living artist in May 2008, £17m, by which time Russian oligarchs had joined the wealthy North American collectors who had already replaced upper-class British patrons. The promotion of pictures at auction sometimes gave unfortunate prominence to the failures, notably the truncated picture of a pregnant Kate Moss.
The artist related his acceptance of the Order of the Companions Honour in 1983 and the Order of Merit in 1993 to his family's debt to Britain, the country that allowed them naturalisation in 1939. Freud described the move to England as "linked to my luck. Hitler's attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I've been."
Queen Elizabeth II sat for a small portrait in 2001 which Freud donated to the Royal Collection. He selected the pictures for the important Constable exhibition that opened in Paris in 2002, respecting the artist's "truth-telling. The way he used the undergrowths to suit himself – things being soaked in water and so on – was a way of looking at nature that no one had really done before."
The portraits Freud made of his mother, beginning in 1972 and ending with a drawing from her deathbed in 1989, are a remarkable elegy of ageing and depression. When his children (15 or so were recognised) began leading independent lives, most of them came to sit for him and he was proud of their talents. Bella Freud is a fashion designer and four others are successful writers – Annie Freud, Esther Freud, and Rose and Susie Boyt. Contrary to what has been written about anonymity, the identities of at least 168 sitters have been revealed in various interviews, commentaries and published information.
Thinking about the women who were closest to him for the longest duration, one realises how reticent they preferred to be, particularly Baroness Willoughby d'Eresby and Susanna Chancellor. Any biography of the artist that is written with the claim to analyse character or feelings is doomed.
The list of those he knew and affected would be enormous (and incomplete), the narratives lopsided, with anecdotes and memoirs exaggerating their author's familiarity. Freud's own, sharp recollections are both exciting and skewed. He recently spoke of how it amused him to hold the heads of schoolmates under water, but his occasional violence was countered by a precise, rather Germanic use of language and good manners.
An admitted control freak, who lived alone and liked to use the telephone but not give out his number, Freud kept relationships in separate compartments. He lived with the same aesthetic as that of his work – fine linen, worn leather, superb works of art (and a few cartoons), buddleia and bamboo in the overgrown garden and the residue of paint carried down from the studio. In this setting, he sustained until the end his ability to make portrayals of many of the people and animals who mattered to him (the one still on the easel, Portrait of a Hound), paintings that face-to-face are all-consuming and oddly liberating.

• Lucian Michael Freud, artist, born 8 December 1922; died 20 July 2011