 One of the most distinguished, versatile and prolific of British cameramen, former journalist and stills photographer Douglas Slocombe intially worked for the Ministry of Information shooting newsreels and propaganda films during WW2, filming the invasions of Holland and Poland. During the '40s and '50s he worked almost exclusively at Ealing, becoming its chief cameraman. He lit with equal dexterity and dramatic flair the realist urban contemporary drama of It Always Rains on Sunday (d. Robert Hamer, 1947) and the pastoral beauty of The Loves of Joanna Godden (d. Charles Frend, 1947), the lavish costume romance of Saraband for Dead Lovers (d. Basil Dearden, 1948), Ealing's first brush with Technicolor, and the exquisite Victoriana of Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Hamer, 1949), as visually delectable as it is literately witty. He experimented boldly with contrasts of light and shade, in both colour and black-and-white, and when Ealing closed he found rewards in freelancing. His contribution to the subtly changing mood of Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), much of it confined to a single elegant terrace house, is immense, winning him a deserved BAFTA and a British Society of Cinematographers award, and in the '60s he came to terms with CinemaScope on such productions as The Lion in Winter (d. Anthony Harvey, 1968). He was involved in some inferior films (e.g., the remake of The Lady Vanishes, d. Anthony Page, 1979), but his work ensured they at least looked better than they deserved, and their genre range suggested that nothing was outside his capacities. In the last decade of his career he worked on such international films as Julia (d. Fred Zinnemann, 1977) and Steven Spielberg's 'Indiana Jones' trilogy. Three times Oscar-nominated (Travels with My Aunt, d. George Cukor, 1973; Julia, 1977; Raiders of the Lost Ark, d. Steven Spielberg, 1981, all US), he won further BAFTAs for The Great Gatsby (US, d. Jack Clayton, 1974) and Julia, he also won in 1995 a Lifetime Achievement Award from the BSC, of which he was a founder, as well as five of its annual awards. Bibliography
Duncan Petrie, The British Cinematographer, 1996. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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