British cinematographer Freddie Francis died 17 March 2007. Born 22 December 1917 outside of London, England, he suffered a stroke in December and never recovered. He won Oscars for his work on 1960’s Sons and Lovers and 1989’s Glory.
Francis started out as a camera assistant in the 1930s, and became a camera operator after serving in World War II. His first film as director of photography was 1956’s A Hill in Korea (the movie in which Michael Caine made his debut).
After Sons and Lovers, Francis turned to directing, starting a two-decade turn in horror, even though he said he didn’t really like the genre.
His genre work included directing The Day of the Triffids (1962, uncredited), The Brain (1962), Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), Torture Garden (1967), The Deadly Bees (1967), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), Trog (1970), Gebissen wird nur nachts (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Tales that Witness Madness (1973), Son of Dracula (1974), Craze (1974), Legend of the Werewolf (1975), The Ghoul (1975), five episodes of the 1976 tv series Star Maidens, The Doctor and the Devils (1985), Dark Tower (1987), and one episode of HBO’s Tales from the Crypt (1996). He was also the cinematographer of Dune (1984) and Return to Oz (1985, uncredited).
In a 1990 New York Times interview, Francis said of his craft: “The most important contribution of any cinematographer is to make things look right.” He also said: “No director has to hire me, but if he hires me, he has to trust me.”