Tilda Swinton, actress in Caravaggio, The Last of England, The Garden, Edward II, Wittgenstein, Blue

Derek was, for us young ones just moved to London from university or homes in the provinces, the greatest fun grown-up you can imagine being around. He wore his renegade identity like a buccaneer’s cape: lightly and with gleeful pride – in fact, a proper swagger – and he made it his business to be inclusive. He spun a party out of every production meeting, every shoot day, every elevenses. This is what very many people know of him. But what I remember most vividly about living alongside him for nine years, after all the paper parades and balloons on sticks, was the peaceable-ness of our pootling about in silence at Dungeness in the garden, on the beach, in his studio, for hours at a time. He was above all a fine – quiet – companion. I miss him very much more for this reason than any other.

Ken Russell on a meeting with Jarman in 1970

The place was spooky. The building – an ice-cold Victorian warehouse on the banks of the Thames – was deserted . . . until I reached the top floor, to find a solitary figure squatting over an oil stove in a small glass house situated beneath a few grimy windows at the far end of the room. This was the young man I had been recommended to meet, an angular, likeable face with a foxlike keenness. He beckoned me inside the glass cave. Wonderful! It was like leaving the Arctic wastes for the bliss of an igloo.

Derek was a budding stage designer; I was looking for a way-out production designer for my stylised version of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon. Was he my man?

Of course he was. All I had to do was look at the art works hanging on the walls: a mind-boggling collection of cardinals’ copes made of see-through plastic, revealing a succession of linings ranging from $100 bills to flotsam dredged from the muddy banks of the Thames.

The rest is history: the proud walls of the medieval town of Loudon were not all covered in mouldy moss, as was the conservative custom in film design at the time, but all gleaming white and bright – as they would have been at the time of their original construction.

Derek was a visionary. Who else could have convinced me to update Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress from Hogarth’s time to the time of the Falklands conflict, with Margaret Thatcher as the sexy madam of a swish London brothel? But apart from being an ideas man, he was a practical one, as well – you only have to look at the 20ft Easter Island primitive head in my film Savage Messiah, that he carved single-handed from a massive block of polystyrene, to marvel at his talent.

Paul Burston, a journalist and author

I first met Derek in 1984 at a club called Bang. I was 19 and had just read his book Dancing Ledge, in which he wrote that by not allowing themselves to get f*****, straight men were experiencing only half of sex. He had a whole coterie around him but was charming and bought me a drink. My boyfriend at the time thought that he was trying to get into my pants.

Derek was the most passionate person I have met. He was always getting something off the ground. His passion was to the point of tunnel vision: a lot of his politics were straight down the line. He was a radical and described himself as queer, not gay: he was very upset when Ian McKellen accepted a knighthood. He called himself a “miserabilist”. He ended up in Peter Tatchell’s direct action group, Outrage. At the time to be open about having Aids was still unusual and he had a rough time in the press about it.

He was like a mischievous uncle and was cheeky rather than gropey. He was a mentor figure to the younger people who flocked around him. I first met him as an activist on Galop (Gay London Policing). He would move heaven and earth to help you and was very encouraging to activists, although he didn’t like it if you disagreed with him.

Derek was very upfront about his illness, suffering and the prospect of dying. He didn’t go along with false optimism. I remember going to a screening of Blue [Jarman’s final film, with no image other than a blue screen – the only thing that Jarman could see, having gone blind] . There were only five of us in the cinema. It’s very moving and by the end I was in a right mess. I didn’t realise until the end that he was behind me. By then he was very frail and I noticed tears on his face. That would have embarrassed him, he hated showing emotion or sentimentality. We ate, like lots of gay arty types back then, at Presto, a cheap Italian restaurant in Soho staffed by older Italian female waitresses with huge helmet hairdos. He had his own booth there and they had pictures of him and his movies on the walls. After he died they made a shrine in the booth.

He had a foot in several different camps. He did pop videos for the Pet Shop Boys, stage sets, films. He is a product of the radical 1960s and 1970s, punk and the DIY aesthetic. My most treasured moment was when he was “knighted” by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and paraded down Old Compton Street in Soho. This was years before Old Compton Street was considered gay and that day he renamed it Queer Street. He was wearing the most amazing robes. He wouldn’t have been in favour of the raging pink economy around Old Compton Street now: he was more donkey jackets, debating and gardening than gym and drugs. He was furiously energised by his illness. No time was wasted.

He didn’t know how to rest. He didn’t really do chitchat.

The last time I saw him he was so tiny and shrunken. His funeral was very traditional and churchy, which struck me as odd. I’ve been to lots of Aids funerals which were camp and celebratory. The irony is that had he lived another year he would have had access to new protease inhibitor drugs and lived far longer. Since he died, the changes for gay men, and people with Aids, have been enormous.

Toyah Willcox, singer and actress in Jubilee and The Tempest

The actor Ian Charleson introduced me to Derek. He thought we were kindred spirits. Every generation has its oddballs and Derek and I were oddballs in the 1970s. He was an absolute radical in every way – artistic, sexual and political. When I met him at his flat in 1977, the first thing that surprised me was that every man in his flat was naked. I didn’t really know what homosexuality was, but he was living with a very beautiful boy, Yves, and there were two other boys in the shadows. We had tea. Derek asked me to look at a script under the sofa, which was for Jubilee. I took the part that had the most lines. In the early days he filmed all of us on Super 8.

He called me after giving me the part in Jubilee to tell me there wasn’t enough money and my part had to be cut. I was absolutely f***ing devastated and he must have heard it in my voice because he put me back in and I strongly suspect he didn’t take his own fee for the film as a result.

In my very first scene I had to jump into bed with Ian and another actor, Karl Johnson. I pulled back the sheet and they were both naked. I gawped. Derek shouted, “What’s wrong?” I asked whether it was really necessary that they were naked. He thought it was funny I had never seen male genitalia up to that point. After Jubilee, I was on benefits, a struggling actress, and once a week he would make me a lovely meal – mushroom soup and bread.

Next I played Miranda in his Tempest. He had such a wealth of knowledge. If Jubilee had been all about the egos and a bit like working in Warhol’s Factory, this was much more Derek as a serious film-maker. He would rarely lose his temper. He might shout: “If I can fing do this, you can fing do this.” Then it was over.

When I became a pop star a few people were keen to see me fail. Not Derek. He was always supportive. It was hard to keep in touch but Derek and I exchanged Christmas cards. His were always embossed with lovely drawings. Because he was always such an eloquent gentleman it was amazing to see those angry canvases he painted about dying and prejudice before he died. They affected me hugely: they conveyed the way people with a terminal illness must feel. I was desperate to see him but Keith, his partner at the end, said it wasn’t possible and I respected that. The one memory I really treasure of Derek is laughter. Laughter was etched on his face all the time.

Simon Fisher Turner, composer for Jarman’s films Caravaggio, The Last of England, The Garden, Edward II and Blue

He was a doer, a big rebel. He made you realise you could do things. I started as a runner on The Tempest. It was a bit like being in a theatre company. If there was a crowd scene he would look around and say: “Who wants to be in this scene?” and if you put your hand up, you were in. He never dictated, that wasn’t his style. He kept an eye on things, said what he sort of wanted from people and let them do their own thing. With Blue we actually started the music in the middle of the film. We recorded it at Brian Eno’s house and the first instrument you hear is an Irish drum that was on Brian’s wall.

I would go to Dungeness and spend one hour out of the day talking about work. He once made me a birthday cake. It was beautifully decorated, two tiers, but he wasn’t very good at baking – I still ate it. He was immensely knowledgeable, but didn’t wear that knowledge heavily. I knew nothing about Yves Klein (when we did Blue) or Caravaggio, but instead of looking at me stupidly, he just said: “Right, let’s go to the National Gallery.” I saw him as a father figure, which would have horrified him. I learnt everything from him.

I last saw him lying dead in the hospital chapel. It wasn’t morbid at all. He was in these amazing robes and looked like a bishop. I thanked him and told him not to worry about himself, or us, and that I loved him. I think I cried. And I told him he looked fantastic.

Andrew Logan, artist, creator of Alternative Miss World

Derek’s career definitely changed after he won Alternative Miss World in 1975. Up until then he had been obscure. It changed for him that night. For his daywear he came as the Nurse from Romeo and Juliet, and for swimwear he wore a model frog on his head. His evening wear was an extraordinary suit of armour and a pair of see-through stockings.

My other half, Michael, gave him his first video camera, which he used to make his first Super 8s. One of the first was called Andrew Logan Kissing 25 Personalities, which was literally that, and they included the film director. I remember it being very glamorous but seeing it at the ICA recently it was rather faded.

We were never lovers but I loved him deeply. He would have film shows at his place (on Bankside) where we’d all sit on the floor. His favourite film was The Wizard of Oz – it’s got everything in it, hasn’t it? Imagination. Suspense. That time – the 1970s – was amazing. Our creative juices flowed. We were always in and out of each other’s places. Derek loved parties and I loved throwing them – there weren’t really clubs in those days. He had the most wonderful laugh, a face full of laughter actually, and was very intellectual, very academic, yet with a childlike air about him, too. He could write a book in a week. He loved gossip and beng a celebrity but was also very modest. He was generous, too, always helping penniless students.

I saw Derek a few weeks before he died. He was still spirited but was very delicate. He was one of a spate of friends I lost around that time who died of Aids: so many died who should have stayed.

Tony Peake, Jarman’s literary agent and biographer

We met when he was making Caravaggio. He wanted a literary agent and I was auditioning him. But Derek didn’t really do dividing lines between professional and personal and we became instant friends. He was a controversial spokesman for many issues but he was also a great small-c conservative. He had a deep love of England and the English countryside. And he was a radical: the garden in Dungeness, in such a dauntingly inhospitable place, shows these two sides of his character.

Derek had immense charm, which made his radicalism that much more palatable. He did have a public face – one of calm, enthusiasm, mischief and laughter. But I think that hid considerable distress, anger, fear and loneliness, certainly towards the end.

He died an incredibly painful death yet bore it with incredible fortitude.

He had found a degree of happiness and stability and constancy with Keith (Collins, his surviving partner) – not that he would ever admit to that. He was militantly proud of being queer, not lesbian or gay, and of not subscribing to rules of any kind. He was, however, close to his mother, and emulated her grace under pressure; and while he had a more tense relationship with his father, a pathfinder with the RAF, I sometimes think of Derek like his dad – tenacious, showing bravery in the face of enemy fire, keeping steady and flying through it. He was a pathfinder, too, forging his own way.

He would have welcomed the gay equality that came eventually but he would have always needled for more. He grew up in the 1950s and 1960s when homosexuality was criminalised, and those scars go deep. I miss him for his sheer zest and wonder and fun, the sense of endless possibilities he had. Others with no money would say: “It’s too hard to make a film.” He would say: “Let’s pick up a camera and do something.” Had he lived he’d be YouTubeing like mad.

Tony Peake’s Derek Jarman is published by Abacus; Jarman’s Super 8s from the 1970s play at Tate Modern, London SE1 (www. tate.org.uk 020-7887 8008) on May 26, with music from Throbbing Gristle (see page 22); Caravaggio is on Sky Arts, Wed, 10pm

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