In all the words that have been devoted to the films of Stanley Kubrick, I do not know whether any writer has invoked Gustave Flaubert’s famous injunction to “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Yet no 20th-century artist, writer, filmmaker, composer, or otherwise, better embodied the spirit of Flaubert’s counsel than Kubrick.

Kubrick made a practice of rebuffing rumors of his alleged reclusiveness and dottiness, but as with most generalizations, there were shards of accuracy within them. Born in New York in 1928, Kubrick reestablished himself so comfortably in England that he declined to leave even when his films were set in a haunted Colorado hotel (The Shining) or Vietnam (Full Metal Jacket). That he was married three times is somehow less notable — less reflective of his actual retiring personality off the set — than the fact that his third marriage, to actress-turned-painter Christiane Harlan, lasted from 1958 until his death in 1999. Together, they raised three daughters. Many dogs are said to have occupied his estate.