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THIS SHINING LIGHT
Recalling Alex Thomson BSC,
a brilliant cinematographer and a great friend of Fujifilm, who died in June aged 78
Born in London in 1929, Alex Thomson started his career at Denham Studios working as a clapper boy for many of Britain’s
top cinematographers
including Freddie Young on So Well Remembered.
He joined Technicolor from 1951 until 1955 and then freelanced as a First Assistant Cameraman. From there he became one of Britain’s top operators working mainly with cinematographer Nicolas Roeg on films such as Lawrence Of Arabia (2nd Unit), The Caretaker, Nothing But The Best, Fahrenheit 451, Masque Of The Red Death and Far From The Madding Crowd.
“I heard that someone else had got the film [Excalibur] but as he didn’t get on with John [Boorman] I was called in to take over.
So I was always second choice. With Tony Pratt’s brilliant sets and John’s compositions, you’d have to be pretty stupid to get it wrong. After all, who knows what Camelot’s really like.”
Thomson photographed his first feature Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, in 1967 and was soon after elected to membership of the British Society of Cinematographers - on June 28, 1968.
In all, he lit 51 feature films and was Oscar nominated in 1981 for John
Boorman’s Excalibur. He acquired two BSC Best Cinematography Awards, for Ridley Scotts’s Legend and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and two BSC nomi- nations for Excalibur and Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka.
He also garnered both the Jury and the Public Award for Best Cinematography in 65mm format for Hamlet at Madridimagen 1997 and an award from the President of the State Committee of Polish Cinematography.
Thomson retired in 2002 and was in that year the recipient of BSC Lifetime Achievement award. Other awards included the BSC 1996 ARRI John Alcott Award, an Emmy in 1979 for The Gold Bug and, in 2006, The Sir Sydney Samuelson Award for services to the film industry.
Amongst his other feature cred- its are: Alfred The Great, Year Of The Dragon, The Sicilian, Leviathan, The Krays, Alien, Cliffhanger and Demolition Man.
Thomson joined the board of the BSC in 1977 and served as President from 1980 to 1982.
His love of the camera department was renowned and is reflected in the volume Out Standing Stills, which he produced for the Society, with help from Robin Vidgeon BSC, as an acknowledgement to the achievements of those “behind the camera”.
Always outspoken and often con- troversial, he occasionally chose to light and operate and strongly believed that the best way to gain a thorough working knowledge of the camera department was to “train on the floor”.
In 1990, Thomson took over editor- ship of the quarterly BSC Newsletter. Before his death, he had already writ- ten the September 2007 issue entitled “From the Other Side” as well as a book of tales from behind the camera called Take One, which should be available in 2008.
“I think The Sicilian is perhaps the best work I’ve ever done.
I loved the colours. It was choreographed so well and I truly thought it was going to be a great movie. In the end, the press slaughtered it. Apparently Michael [Cimino] took the script to Gore Vidal hoping he might give it a polish. ‘It doesn’t need a polish,’ Vidal told him. ‘It needs a trip to Lourdes.’”
According to John de Borman BSC: “Alex was a man of great style and wit that I loved dearly.”
Added BSC secretary/treasurer Frances Russell: “He will be sadly missed not least for his ability, when things got heated at board meetings, to slip in some hilarious one liner, which would have us all rolling around on the floor! I am also enjoying typing out his Take One book, and feel he’s still with me!”
For Kenneth Branagh, who as a director collaborated three times with him – on Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and a short, Listening – Thomson
Photo main: The late Alex Thomson BSC; above l-r: with Peter O’Toole on High Spirits; on the set of Alexander The Great in 1955; Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet; with Julie Christie in Fahrenheit 451; Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger;
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