Terence Davies (November 10, 1945 -) is a British screenwriter - film director, sometime novelist and actor. As a filmmaker, Davies is noted for his recurring themes of emotional (and sometimes physical) endurance, the influence of memory on everyday life and the potentially crippling effects of dogmatic religiosity on the emotional life of individuals and societies. Stylstically, Davies' works are notable for their symmetrical compositions, "symphonic" structure and measured pace.

Davies was born in Liverpool to working-class Catholic parents, the youngest child in a family of ten children (seven surviving). After leaving school at sixteen, he worked for ten years as a shipping-office clerk and as an unqualifed accountant, before leaving Liverpool to attend Coventry Drama School. While there, he wrote the screenplay for what became his first autobiographical short, Children (1978), filmed under the auspices of the BFI Production Fund. After this introduction to filmmaking, Davies went to the National Film School, completing Madonna and Child (1980), a continuation of the story of Davies' alterego, Robert Tucker, covering his years as a clerk in Liverpool. Three years later, he completed the trilogy with Death and Transfiguration (1983), in which he hypothesizes the circumstances of his death. These works went on to be screened together at film festivals throughout Europe and the US as The Terence Davies Trilogy , winning numerous awards.

Due to funding difficulties and his refusal to compromise, Davies' output has been comparitively sporadic, with only four feature films released to date. At the time of writing, the fifth, Sunset Song , a adaptation of the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbons, is in production.

His most recent work in any medium is A Walk To The Paradise Gardens, a radio play broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2001.