The man who made women beautiful
As a play explores Jack Cardiff’s life, Holly Williams finds out why Hollywood’s leading ladies adored the cinematographer
In a garage in Ely, Cambridgeshire, hangs a portrait of Marilyn Monroe. On it she has written: “My darling Jack, if only I could be how you made me look.” Jack Cardiff, cinematographer, photographer and director, who died in 2009, is famous as “the man who made women beautiful”. In doing so, he found adoring fans – and sometimes lovers – among the most beautiful women of Hollywood, including Ava Gardner, Katharine Hepburn and Sophia Loren. Cardiff called Monroe, of whom he took a series of photographs during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956, “as near perfect as any cameraman could wish for”. She in turn called him the best cinematographer in the world.
Talk to people in the movie business, and they will agree. Thanks to his pioneering work in Technicolor on Powell and Pressburger’s films, including A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Red Shoes (1948) and Black Narcissus (1947), for which he won an Oscar, Cardiff became a cinematic legend, inspiring such directors as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
Originally thinking of becoming an artist, Cardiff once said the cameraman is “the man who paints the movie”. He took his cues from Vermeer, Renoir and Van Gogh: how the Old Masters lit faces, how Impressionists lit landscapes, and how Expressionists used colour can all be seen in the radiant beauty of his films. Now Cardiff ’s own story – a life as colourful as his cinematography – is being told on stage: Prism, by Terry Johnson, opens next week at the Hampstead Theatre. The seed was planted seven years ago, shortly after Cardiff ’s death following a struggle with Alzheimer’s. The youngest of his four sons, Mason – a film writer/ director, named after James Mason – met Robert Lindsay in a local pub, and as their friendship developed, the actor became fascinated by stories of how Alzheimer’s had suspended Cardiff in his glory days as a cinematographer.
Mason showed Lindsay the garage where the family kept all the film memorabilia they’d surrounded Cardiff with in his final years. And when Lindsay spied that signed portrait – and then heard how the frail Cardiff had become convinced that one young care assistant was, in fact, Marilyn Monroe – he knew they had a show. The pair took Johnson to lunch to discuss writing the script; by pudding, he was convinced too.
His son says that his father was a gentleman, but had a mischievous sense of fun too; he loved to travel, loved a drink, and loved women (he married three times). When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, his wife Niki O’donahue, a script consultant, and Mason obviously feared the worst. In fact, Cardiff appeared transported back to the happiest times of his life. “The doctors said you have to go with it, wherever he goes – or it’s too frightening,” says Mason. They even taught the carers filmmaking terminology so they could play along.
“He went back to filming with his old friends. It was very real; he was talking, quite technically, with Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. You could actually listen to conversations that happened 50, 60 years ago.” He recalls once hearing his father reliving a conversation with Monroe, when she’d called him over to the Beverly Hills hotel, and was pacing up and down convinced the Kennedys were trying to assassinate her…
Prism – part fact, part fiction – promises to include details of his “secret liaisons” with leading ladies, and includes sexually flirtatious encounters between Cardiff and two of the most glamorous: Hepburn and Monroe. Still, there’s artistic licence aplenty here and Johnson is quick to point out “the only person who really knows what happened is Jack Cardiff. It’s not a play about his affairs… I don’t think of him as a womaniser.”
Indeed, it seems it was the women who loved him. “He certainly had an affair with Sophia Loren, and with Leslie Caron,” says Lindsay, speaking of Cardiff ’s early years in the industry. “He was an English gentleman who was very experienced and he flattered women, he made them look beautiful, and that’s extremely attractive. Monroe adored him.”
Cardiff also adored her, admiring with a cameraman’s eye her beauty. “She had a classically sound bone structure,” he once said. “But I had to be careful about her nose, so delightfully retroussé. For if the key light was too low, a blob would show up on the tip.” Prism shows the pair getting close during a photo shoot – “art”, as Cardiff also liked to say, “is an intimate thing”, although in reality their relationship probably never went beyond mutual affection.
Lindsay met Cardiff near the end of his life, a spry 94-year-old; they bonded over memories of Hepburn (she took Lindsay out for dinner after admiring his Broadway performance in Me and My Girl in 1986). “We drank a lot of wine and talked about Katie, and I realised he had a real soft spot for the woman – as did I.”
Cardiff got close to Hepburn during the famously calamitous shooting of Huston’s The African Queen, on location in the Congo, where the cast and crew had to swerve black mambas and crocodiles. Hepburn was so sick she had a bucket out of shot to vomit into; only Huston and Bogart, who favoured whisky over water, stayed healthy. The encounter is recreated in the play with Johnson striking a romantic note – and Lindsay is sure the pair were “enamoured” of each other, even if she ultimately stayed faithful to her lover Spencer Tracy. “Jack made her look stunning, he kept reassuring her: ‘you shine from within’. That’s a lovely thing
‘Jack made Hepburn look stunning, he kept reassuring her: “you shine from within” ’
to say to any woman,” says Lindsay. But Mason recalls that his father was “never bothered with celebrity” and never “ran after” actresses. “But if you’re travelling around the world, in beautiful locations, with a stunning icon and it’s your job to make her look beautiful and feel great… infatuations do form I guess,” continues Mason. “And vice versa.”
This was all before Mason was born – he insists his father was devoted to his mother, Niki, Cardiff ’s third wife. And he couldn’t speak more warmly of him as a dad. Regretting sending his first three sons to boarding school, Cardiff took Mason with him on shoots around the world. Mason made his screen debut aged six, following in his father’s footsteps: Cardiff began acting at four – his parents had been performers in touring Vaudeville shows.
Cardiff moved into directing in the Sixties: successfully, with an adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. He later returned to cinematography, and even if he was never to regain the dizzy heights of his early achievements (Rambo: First Blood Part II, anyone?), his reputation has endured.
Mention you’re doing a play about him to any film crew, Lindsay has discovered, and they go weak at the knees. “Jack Cardiff is an icon in the film industry. He really is a hero.” Prism opens at the Hampstead Theatre on Sep 14; hampsteadtheatre.co.uk