Haskell Wexler

Cinematographer Born: February 6, 1922; Died: December 27, 2015 HASKELL Wexler, who has died, aged 93, was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated and most controversial cinematographers. He worked on prestigious feature films and won two Oscars, but he also made low-budget documentaries and in 1974, during the Vietnam War, he accompanied Jane Fonda to North Vietnam to make the notorious documentary Introduction to the Enemy.

Wexler, who survived 10 days in a lifeboat after being torpedoed during the Second World War, was still working in his nineties. One of his last public appearances was at the 2015 Edinburgh International Film Festival, which screened Who Needs Sleep?, a documentary about sleep deprivation among film crews.

He was the last winner of the Oscar specifically for black and white cinematography for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1967. He was especially noted for his dramatic use of contrast and shadows and used hand-held cameras to reflect the claustrophobia of the drama.

Ten years later he won another Oscar for Bound for Glory, a biopic of the folk singer Woody Guthrie, whom he had met during the war when they were merchant seamen. Like most of Wexler’s later films, it was in colour, even though Wexler himself was colour-blind.

He also wrote, directed and shot the cult 1969 film Medium Cool, a drama that played out against civil unrest in the United States and used documentary footage of riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the previous year. It is one of six films on which Wexler worked that are preserved in the US National Film Registry as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

Wexler worked repeatedly with leftwing and liberal directors and many of his films had a political element, including In the Heat of the Night (1967), an Oscar-winning thriller and powerful indictment of racism with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, and Coming Home (1978), with Jon Voigt as a disabled Vietnam veteran and Jane Fonda as his lover.

Wexler also encouraged the teenaged George Lucas to pursue his dream of becoming a film-maker and made flying visits to work on his early hit drama American Graffiti (1973), subsidised by his more lucrative work on commercials.

And in 2000, by which time Wexler was established as one of the biggest names in the business, he worked as second camera assistant on Bread and Roses, a drama about Hispanic cleaners in Los Angeles, directed by Ken Loach and scripted by the Scottish writer Paul Laverty.

The son of a wealthy American industrialist, Wexler was born in Chicago in 1922 and helped organise a strike at his father’s electronics factory when he was just 17. He worked as a cameraman on industrial films and by the mid-1960s had graduated to director of photographer on prestigious Hollywood features.

His Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was followed by nominations for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Matewan and Blaze, as well as a second win for Bound for Glory.

He was sacked from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest well into the shoot. He claimed it was because he was also making a documentary about the Weather Underground revolutionary organisation, though director Milos Forman said it was because of his negative attitude on set.

Wexler shared the Oscar nomination with another cinematographer Bill Butler. Wexler said: “There’s only about a minute or two minutes in that film I didn’t shoot.”

He is survived by his third wife Rita Taggart, and by three children from previous marriages.