Alex Thomson

Alexander Thomson, cinematographer: born London 12 January 1929; married 1963 Diana Golding (one daughter); died Chertsey, Surrey 14 June 2007.

Alex Thomson had a career that would barely be possible today. He was director of photography on 53 feature films, prior to which he worked on countless others, via the one-time classic route of clapper boy, focus puller, camera operator and eventually lighting cameraman. If perhaps no one single credit cries out for attention, the body of work is remarkable. Many sequences filmed by Thomson are exquisite and, almost uniquely, he worked in every single screen format with alacrity and class. His rugged good looks and towering individuality made him a presence to be reckoned with on the studio floor, and his sheer talent and love of cinema brought him international peer acclaim.

Alex Thomson was born in 1929, the son of a Bond Street tailor. After National Service, where he served in the Royal Signal Corps despite a severe ear condition leading to partial deafness, he applied for a job at Denham Studios. As ever, it was difficult to find work in the film industry, but he was extremely persistent, telephoning the studios every week for two years. He eventually landed a job as part of the ace cinematographer Freddie Young's crew on So Well Remembered (1946). Thomson trained within the studio system, first at Denham (which closed in 1950) and then at Pinewood, and was one of the last British cinematographers to do so. He was fortunate enough to work as clapper boy, often clapper loader (the person who actually loads the raw film into the camera) on such films as Cardboard Cavalier (1949), starring Sid Field, and Roy Baker's superb submarine drama Morning Departure (1950).

When Denham closed, Thomson was taken on by Technicolor, which was still shooting (and printing) three-strip colour masters. He worked on at least two of the finest British Technicolor features: Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1955) in the VistaVision process, assisting the cameraman Otto Heller; and John Huston's ravishing Moulin Rouge (1952), as uncredited assistant to the director of photography Oswald Morris. Morris's unique combinations of cigarette smoke, fog filters and creative lighting led to a deputation from Technicolor famously visiting the set in disgust to tell Morris and Huston that they were "ruining everything we stand for and we cannot support what you are doing". Huston asked Morris what he thought of the shot material, and Morris replied: "I think it's great." Huston said: "So do I, kid." And to Technicolor he said: "Gentlemen. Fuck you. And thank you."

In such a movie-making university of talent Alex Thomson gradually became a superb technician, learning from master craftsmen such as Heller, Morris and the brilliant Robert Krasker, and from the style of swashbuckling directors like the formerly blacklisted Edward Dmytryk and the flamboyant Huston, for whom he would work again as second unit cameraman on The Man Who Would Be King (1975), shooting in the Hindu Kush. Huston, who, like David Lean, loathed second unit, allegedly said of Thomson's work: "Even I couldn't do better than him."

Thomson graduated to focus puller on such films as the excellent Town On Trial (1957) and became a camera operator, the person who actually shoots the pictures, on a variety of British-based features, including the 70mm Scent of Mystery (1960, revived last year at the widescreen festival at Bradford, minus its original Smell-o-Vision gimmick) and Doctor Crippen and Postman's Knock (both 1962). He was second unit camera operator for Freddie Young on the 70mm Lawrence of Arabia, which won the Best Cinematography Academy Award in 1962.

Thomson had met the cameraman Nicolas Roeg on the television series Police Dog in the Fifties, and was asked to be his camera operator on a series of distinguished British features, including The Caretaker (1963), filmed in incredibly cramped circumstances, Nothing but the Best (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (also 1966). Thomson's last operating job for Roeg was on John Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) which premiered in a beautiful 70mm blow-up.

Perhaps the finest of the Roeg-Thomson collaborations was The Masque of the Red Death (1964) for the director Roger Corman, which caused some laboratory consternation. The rushes were late as the lab tried to "correct out" the deliberate camera lighting effects, as everything in front of the lens became redder and redder - as demanded by the plot. When Roeg himself became a director he asked Thomson to be his lighting man, and together they achieved superb cinematic results on Eureka (1983), in which you could almost touch the grains of sand, and Track 29 (1988).

Thomson's own break as director of photography came in 1967 with Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, a film that virtually defined the Swinging London look, followed by The Strange Affair (1968), one of the best ever uses of London locations. It was filmed in Techniscope, a process that necessitated a laboratory blow-up for projection, famously resulting in some grain on the screen. In Thomson's photography, the surfaces chosen cleverly disguised the visible grain and the film did not suffer in the manner of other contemporary Techniscope pictures.

Having also operated for Nicolas Roeg on the 1965 epic Doctor Zhivago before Roeg was replaced by Freddie Young, Thomson was well-versed in big-scale photography. Clive Donner, of Mulberry Bush, hired him as cinematographer for Alfred the Great (1969), a prestigious MGM would-be epic from the producer of How the West Was Won. It looked marvellous, and catapulted Thomson into international-class film-making; Alfred's blow-up to 70mm was so superb that it looked almost as though it had been filmed on 70mm negative.

A run of good-looking but unremarkable British features followed, including Fear is the Key (1972), The Class of Miss MacMichael (1979) and The Cat and the Canary (1979). When John Boorman asked for Thomson for Excalibur (1981) the collaboration proved a treat for cineastes, although audiences didn't exactly flock. Nevertheless, the film earned Thomson his only Academy Award nomination, well-deserved for Best Cinematography, and consolidated his international reputation. The combination of his Oscar nomination and the fact that he replaced the late Geoffrey Unsworth on Superman (1978) led to the gipsy hitting the road, as Thomson found his talents more in demand internationally, especially in Hollywood.

For the director Michael Cimino, Thomson both lit and operated on The Year of the Dragon (1985) and The Sicilian (1987), for the former creating a marvellously real yet strangely stylised Chinatown in the studio. In the BFI publication The British Cinematographer, Thomson was quoted as saying "I'm never happier than when I'm in the studio", unsurprising for someone with his training, but surprising for someone with his location experience. In the studio at Pinewood, Thomson created the disturbing look of Legend for Ridley Scott but the film itself didn't rise to the standard of photography which won Thomson the British Society of Cinematographers' top award for 1985.

Thomson was now a much requested international cinematographer and worked on such films as Alien 3 (1992) and two major Sylvester Stallone pictures, Renny Harlin's Cliffhanger (1993) and Demolition Man (also 1993), on which the director Marco Brambilla's work was augmented by that of the editor Stuart Baird. Baird promptly hired Thomson to shoot his own directorial début, Executive Decision (1996). Neither The Scarlet Letter (1995) nor Black Beauty (1994) set the box office alight, but both looked exquisite.

But in the autumn of his career came the film that defines Thomson's genius, and, rightly, won his second BSC award. The director Kenneth Branagh wanted to film Hamlet at Blenheim Palace and at Shepperton in 70mm, using Panavision-70 lenses and cameras and not resorting to blow-ups, as was then current. He selected Thomson to light his star-studded, full-length Shakespearian extravaganza: it was a match made in heaven.

Thomson's camera set-ups were truly extraordinary and so utterly breathtaking that, as often with great cinema, audiences and critics alike failed to notice the style, smitten as they were by the context. Seldom has the 70mm frame been treated as well, or as elegantly, as in Hamlet (1996). Suffice to mention just two of Thomson's remarkable long-take set-pieces: first, the entrance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into Elsinore, as the camera tracks and glides with them as they are welcomed by Claudius and Gertrude; secondly the scene where Hamlet greets the players, which involves a 360-degree pan that casually reveals Charlton Heston's Player King and contains zooms so subtle that they are barely noticeable on first viewing. This is cinema on a grand scale, obviously appreciated by Branagh, who asked Thomson to work on his Love's Labour's Lost (2000), a production on a smaller scale, but nevertheless also extremely interesting.

But Thomson's health was not strong. His career had suffered when in 1973 he was injured after falling from a camera rig on Jesus Christ Superstar, and he had really never properly recovered. In his seventies, he walked aided by a cane (he had had operations on both knees) and wore glasses, which ill suited the Romany image. He retired, with no regrets, in 2001, becoming a welcome presence at film schools and industry seminars, often seen at Bafta gatherings and British Society of Cinematographers (BSC) Guild meetings, still flashing that roguish smile, eyes still sparkling. In 2002, Alex Thomson was honoured by the BSC with a lifetime achievement award.

Tony Sloman