Ronnie Taylor
Cameraman and cinematographer who won an Oscar for his work on Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi
RONNIE TAYLOR, who has died aged 93, was an Oscarwinning British camera operator and cinematographer who worked for some of the biggest names in cinema.
He was best known for his collaborations with Richard Attenborough, whom he had first met when he was working as a camera operator at Pinewood Studios on The Boys In Brown (1949), set in a Borstal institution.
As a cinematographer he worked with Attenborough on his first feature, Oh! What A Lovely War (1969) and they went on to collaborate on Gandhi (1982), A Chorus Line (1985) and Cry Freedom (1987).
Taylor shared the Best Cinematography Oscar, with Billy Williams, for Gandhi, having been called in to take over mid-production when Williams had to return to Britain for medical treatment. “I was thrown into it straight away,” he recalled in an interview with the British Cinematographer website. “Billy and I did about 10 weeks each on the picture. Richard Attenborough decided that if there were going to be any nominations, that Billy and I should share the credit.”
Taylor also collaborated three times with Dario Argento, the master of the Italian giallo (horror film) genre, whom he first met when asked to shoot a commercial for Fiat in Australia, which Argento was directing. Their most notable collaboration was the visually spectacular Opera (1987, released in England on video as Terror at the
Opera), set in Parma’s Teatro Regio during an avant-garde production of Verdi’s Macbeth, in which a young soprano’s debut as Lady Macbeth is disrupted by a masked and blackgloved serial killer.
Ronald Charles Taylor was born on October 27 1924 in Hampstead, north London. After leaving Highgate School in 1939 he trained in radio communication with a view to joining the Royal Navy as a radio officer. But he changed his mind after a neighbour, a studio manager at Gainsborough Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, took him on a tour of the studio and he got a job working in the sound department.
He soon moved over to cameras, working as a clapper/loader on The Young Mr Pitt (1942), then graduating to focus puller – the film crew member who maintains image sharpness – on The Man In Grey (1942).
From 1943 to 1945 Taylor served as a radio operator in the Merchant Navy, mostly on Atlantic convoys. Back in England he returned to Gainsborough Studios, where he remained until they closed in 1949, by which time he was a camera operator.
He worked behind the camera on films including Passport to Pimlico (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and Brandy for the Parson (1952), and a couple of years in Brazil working for the Vera Cruz film company in Sao Paulo.
His other operator credits included Room at the Top (1959), Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1962), Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) and Tommy (1975), George Lucas’s Star
Wars (1977), a film which, he recalled, most of the camera crew thought was “a load of rubbish, obviously to be proved completely wrong”, and Douglas Hickox’s Zulu Dawn (1979). He also worked on Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, but resigned before the end of filming: “Kubrick was a difficult director. He kept wanting to check the image through the viewfinder. This went on for several days before I said I wanted to go. But he wanted me to stay. He still interfered, so I left.”
Taylor’s first outing as a cinematographer was in 1962 when he was co-cinematographer, with Freddie Francis (who also directed the film), on Two and Two Make Six. He took over as cinematographer on Ken Russell’s Tommy from Dick Bush, who had left after a disagreement with Russell.
Other cinematography credits included the American director Harold Becker’s neo-noir thriller Sea of Love (1989) starring Al Pacino. His final credit was Argento’s Sleepless (2001), after which he retired to Ibiza.
Taylor was president of the British Society of Cinematographers from 1990 to 1992.
His wife Mary predeceased him and he is survived by two daughters.