Obituary: Adrian Biddle (original) (raw)

Adrian Biddle, who has died of a heart attack aged 53, was one of the last of the old school of cinematographers - and one of the first of the new. He was old school because his generation was the last to have come up entirely through the ranks; he understood every job and facet of the camera department, while lighting cameramen now often arrive at the post having bypassed the lower grades. He was one of the first of the new because he embraced all the technologies that burst forth in the 1980s, bypassing the old lighting techniques.

The son of a grocer from Woolwich, south London, Adrian broke into the film industry at the age of 15 thanks to his record as a champion swimmer on the Kent county team. At the time the film world was a closed shop: you could not get a job without being a member of the union, or get union membership without a job. There was, however, no waiting list for underwater camera crew, and when Adrian met Gil Woxholt, the legendary underwater photographer promptly enrolled him as his trainee. Thus in 1969, at the age of 16, Adrian worked underwater on On Her Majesty's Secret Service (20 years later he was the cinematographer on another Bond film, The World Is Not Enough) and followed that with When Eight Bells Toll and Murphy's War (both 1971).

With tenacity and a natural affinity for cameras, he quickly proved his worth, earning promotion as a clapper loader in charge of loading the negative. He started to work for Ridley Scott at the director's company, RSA, putting in time on numerous commercials, and went with him to France as loader on Scott's first feature film, The Duellists (1977). He was promoted again on Alien (1979), where he became Scott's focus puller, a role that required him to almost never leave the camera and made him a silent witness to everything that happened around it. Adrian used to say that he learned about lighting from being stuck on a crane with Scott for hours while the director set up the shot.

Scott was an ex-BBC art director who had successfully been making adverts since the late 1960s, creating a distinctive photographic style of diffused, smoky backlight, and he transferred this style to The Duellists and Alien. Advertising, however, was changing, producing sharper images with more contrast.

I joined RSA in 1980, and offered Adrian the chance to light a commercial himself; at the (very young) age of 28 he thus became a lighting cameraman. It was still photographers who achieved the best images at the time, so he developed several new lights to give adverts the same impact as stills. The next four years saw him produce an impressive body of work, resuming his relationship with Scott on the acclaimed commercial that launched Apple Computers in 1984.

The following year Scott introduced Adrian to James Cameron, who hired him to photograph the sequel to Alien, Aliens. In this, his first film as director of photography, Adrian combined all his technical skills to produce images not seen before. The flashes from the machine guns had an almost fetish-like sensuality that has been copied in every film since, but on Aliens they had the shock of the new.

In general, films up to this point used lots of light and lots of depth of field. Adrian had the rare ability to work at a very wide aperture, allowing highlights, such as the gun flashes, to burn right through the film emulsion, while maintaining essential detail elsewhere. In the days before digital finishing, where cameramen now have great latitude in their exposure, he produced a perfect negative every time.

A stream of Hollywood pictures followed: Princess Bride (1987) for Rob Reiner, Ron Howard's Willow (1988) and two more films for Ridley Scott, Thelma and Louise (1991, for which he received Bafta and Oscar nominations) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992). In all, Adrian lit 26 films in 19 years, including Neil Jordan's Butcher Boy (1997), for which he received the European Cinematographer of the Year award. His last films were Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and V For Vendetta, which is due for release in March and promises to rekindle the dark brooding sensuality Adrian achieved in Aliens. It may well prove to be his finest film.

He leaves a wife and three children, all of whom work in the film industry.

· Adrian Biddle, cinematographer, born July 20 1952; died December 7 2005