Oswald Morris

Oswald Morris (b. 1925) is a pioneering, Academy Award-winning British film cinematographer, who worked on many high-profile films during his long career, working particularly closely with director John Huston in an eight-film collaboration. Morris photographed such varied stars as Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Michael Caine, James Mason, and Marlon Brando.

Morris began his career as a teenager, working as a gofer and clapper boy at Wembley Studios beginning in 1932. He was later promoted to assistant cameraman, and worked on a series of "quickie" films to comply with Britain's Cinematograph Act. Following service as an RAF bomber pilot during World War II, Morris returned to film, serving as camera operator on David Lean's 1948 version of Oliver Twist. He soon rose to become cinematographer for John Huston on Beat the Devil with Humphrey Bogart and Robert Morley) and the 1956 version of Moby Dick, for which Morris also developed a unique color process. Subsequent films ranged from Farewell to Arms and The Guns of Navarone to Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (with Peter Sellers), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and the musical Oliver!, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination, in 1969. In 1972, he won the Oscar, for Fiddler on the Roof, and would receive one more nomination, in 1979, for The Wiz, with such varied films as Scrooge, Sleuth, and The Seven Per-Cent Solution coming in between.

Although Morris officially retired in 1979, he was persuaded to return to Ellstree Studios to shoot The Great Muppet Caper and The Dark Crystal back to back. On the former, when Morris' credit appears, noting his membership in the British Society of Cinematographers, Fozzie asks, "Kermit, what does B.S.C. mean?" In 1998, Morris was awarded the Order of the British Empire for "services to cinematography and the film industry," and in 2006, published his memoir, Huston, We Have a Problem.