Jack Cardiff

He is also known for his work as a director – in particular, his critically acclaimed film Sons and Lovers (1960) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. In 2000, he was appointed as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and, in 2001, he was awarded an Academy Honorary Award for his contribution to the cinema. Work is reviewed in the documentary film Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (2010) and Terry Johnson's stage play Prism (2017).

Cardiff was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, the son of Florence and John Joseph Cardiff, music hall entertainers. He worked as an actor from an early age, both in the music hall and in a number of silent films, including My Son, My Son (1918), Billy's Rose (1922), The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots (1923) and Tip Toes (1927). At 15, he began working as a camera assistant, clapper boy and production runner for British International Pictures, including Alfred Hitchcock's The Skin Game (1931).

In 1935, Cardiff graduated as a camera operator and occasional cinematographer, working mostly for London Films. He was a camera operator on the first film in Britain shot in Technicolor, Wings of the Morning (1937). When the Second World War began, he worked as a cinematographer on public information films. He did a number of films on India where the British wanted to showcase the new capital city of Delhi. The turning point in his career was as a second unit Technicolor camera operator on Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943); they were sufficiently impressed to hire Cardiff as cinematographer on their post-war Technicolor A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Their collaboration continued with Black Narcissus (1947), which won Cardiff an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and The Red Shoes (1948). These films put Cardiff's talents in high demand, and a string of big-budget films followed. In 1995, the British Society of Cinematographers conferred a lifetime achievement award on Cardiff.

In the late 1950s Cardiff began to direct, with two modest successes in Intent to Kill (1958) and Web of Evidence (1959). His version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers (1960), starring Trevor Howard, Wendy Hiller and Dean Stockwell, was a hit, critically and at the box-office. It received seven Oscar nominations (including a Best Director nomination for Cardiff) and Freddie Francis won for Best Black-and-White Cinematography. Cardiff received a Golden Globe Award for Best Director.

After concentrating on direction in the 1960s, he returned to cinematography in the 1970s and 1980s, working on mainstream commercial films in the United States. One of the last films Cardiff photographed was at Pinewood Studios in 2004 when he lit veteran actor Sir John Mills in a short entitled Lights 2 (dir. Marcus Dillistone). The combined age of leading actor and cinematographer was a record 186 years.

Cardiff died on 22 April 2009, aged 94, the same day as Ken Annakin, with whom he had worked on The Fifth Musketeer (1979). He was survived by his wife and his four sons.

Jack Cardiff was the camera operator and then cinematographer for 73 films, documentaries and TV series between 1935 and 2007. These are some of the main films: