Douglas Slocombe arrives for a tribute to actress Vanessa Redgrave in London, Nov. 13, 2011.Joel Ryan/The Associated Press
Douglas Slocombe, the chameleonic British cinematographer who filmed the Nazi invasion of Poland and the adventures of Indiana Jones, has died at the age of 103.
His daughter, Georgina Slocombe, said Mr. Slocombe died Feb. 22 in a London hospital. A recent fall led to setbacks that ended with his death, she said. "He said the other day that he loved every day of his work, every day on the set," she said.
Mr. Slocombe was one of British cinema's most acclaimed cinematographers. He shot some 80 films, working with directors as varied as George Cukor, John Huston, Norman Jewison and Roman Polanski. His career began with the famed Ealing black comedies of the late 1940s and early fifties, and ended with three Indiana Jones films for Steven Spielberg: 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, and two sequels, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, his final film.
"Dougie Slocombe … loved the action of filmmaking," Mr. Spielberg said. "Harrison Ford was Indiana Jones in front of the camera but, with his whip-smart crew, Dougie was my behind-the-scenes hero for the first three Indy movies."
Mr. Slocombe was nominated for three Academy Awards and won three from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for 1974's The Great Gatsby, 1963's The Servant and 1977's Julia. The British Society of Cinematographer gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1995.
While in his 20s, he documented Germany's 1939 Polish invasion as a newsreel cameraman. His footage was used in Herbert Kline's documentary, Lights Out in Europe. "I had no understanding of the concept of blitzkrieg. I had been expecting trouble but I thought it would be in trenches [as in the First World War]," Mr. Slocombe told the BBC in 2014. "The Germans were coming over the border at a great pace."
After the war, he became the house cinematographer for Ealing Studios, filming many of its classic comedies, such as The Lavender Hill Mob. After the studio closed, he signed on to a number of CinemaScope releases, such as A High Wind in Jamaica. Other credits through the 1960s and seventies included The Lion in Winter, The Italian Job and Rollerball.
"A lot of cameramen try to evolve a technique and then apply that to everything," he once said. "But I suffer from a bad memory and could never remember how I'd done something before, so I could always approach something afresh. I found I was able to change techniques on picture after picture."