He says in a December 2008 online interview that this is due to polyps in his throat which were so severe that a doctor told him he was taking in ten percent of the air he was supposed to have been getting. While Barker is critical of organized religion, he has stated that he is a believer in both God and the afterlife, and that the Bible influences his work.įans have noticed of late that Barker's voice has become gravelly and coarse. This award is presented 'to an openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individual who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for any of those communities'. In 2003, Clive Barker received The Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th GLAAD Media Awards. Barker's second long-term relationship, with photographer David Armstrong, ended in 2009. It was in Liverpool in 1975 that he met his first partner, John Gregson, with whom he lived until 1986. Educated at Dovedale Primary School and Quarry Bank High School, he studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University and his picture now hangs in the entrance hallway to the Philosophy Department. It also isn't technically a horror movie, but it is a good one.Clive Barker was born in Liverpool, England, the son of Joan Rubie (née Revill), a painter and school welfare officer, and Leonard Barker, a personnel director for an industrial relations firm.

The reason it ranks so low is that it isn’t really a Clive Barker film, as he didn't write or direct it, and it's based on someone else's book he only produced it. Whale’s attempts at flirtation are met with blunt homophobia from the initially reluctant Boone, but when he decides to pose for a series of paintings, the pair form an unlikely friendship despite their differences. A sliver of light arrives in Whale’s darkness and comes in the buff form of Clayton Boone, a sulky dimwit with a godly physique and a short fuse. Whale as depicted here is something of an eccentric and cranky recluse, occasionally granting interviews to pompous queens and subsequently shredding them with his sharp-tongued vulturine wit and sporadic lapses, induced by illness into terror and confusion. Related: The Best Brendan Fraser Movies and Shows After The Mummy Franchise

The Clive Barker-produced film examines the later stages of the filmmaker’s life, his struggle with a degenerative mental illness, and the relationship that develops with the troubled and stubbornly heterosexual Clayton Boone, played by Brendan Fraser. A surreally speculative reimagining of filmmaker and gay icon James Whales' life, Gods and Monsters adopts a non-linear narrative trajectory that is not straight-up horror but a tightly-constructed and sympathetic homage to a doomed artist wherein one man’s memory, dreams, and timeline overlap to mind-bending nightmarish effect.

Clive barker in the flesh