Douglas Slocombe

A celebrated English cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe received his training as both a photo-journalist and as a newsreel cameraman during WWII, filming the German invasion of Poland and Holland. After the war, he joined Ealing Studios, where unlike many directors of photography he did not rise through the ranks. Slocombe used his newsreel training to basically learn on the job, shooting such acclaimed films as "Kind Hearts and Coronets" (1949), "The Lavender Hill Mob" (1952) and "The Man in the White Suit" (1955). For much of his career, he worked with the same camera operator, Chic Waterson. An elegant craftsman whose trademark was the detail of his shots, Slocombe later contributed to landmark British features of the 1960s including "The L-Shaped Room" (1962) and Joseph Losey's "The Servant" (1963). For John Huston's "Freud" (1962), Slocombe had to work in five distinct styles to represent what was occurring onscreen: there was the strict narrative, a distinct style for flashbacks, one for dream sequences, another for nightmares and yet another for memories. His extraordinary success was honored with a British Academy Award. Despite his excellent, crisp work on such efforts as "The Lion in Winter" (1968), Slocombe earned his first Oscar nomination for "Travels With My Aunt" (1972). He brought to life the Roaring Twenties in Jack Clayton's "The Great Gatsby" (1974) and earned a second Academy nod for "Julia" (1977). That same year, he began an association with wunderkind Steven Spielberg, shooting additional footage in India for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." While Slocombe did fine work for other (sometimes mediocre) films, some of his best work was for Spielberg's Indiana Jones trilogy. He garnered his third Academy Award nomination for "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) and went on to bring a unified look to the sequels "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984) and his last feature "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1989). Douglas Slocombe died in his native London on February 22, 2016. He was 103 years old.