Sir Geoffrey Unsworth OBE (1914-1978) was a British cinematographer who enjoyed a long and varied career in the British film industry, working on nearly 90 feature films spanning more than 40 years.

After working as a camera operator on films for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Unsworth made his debut as cinematographer on the documentary feature The People's Land in 1943.

His film work brought him an impressive array of awards, including five British Society of Cinematographers awards, three BAFTAS and two Academy Awards. Unsworth was especially in demand as cinematographer in two very different genres, period pieces and science fiction. Among the highlights of his career, he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the visually innovative 2001: A Space Odyssey and lensed Bob Fosse's dark musical exploration of the end of Weimar Germany, Cabaret. On a lighter film, such as Murder on the Orient Express his lighting and use of diffusion capture the danger and romance of the train while graceful integration of camera movement and optical effects contributes to the realism of the set while controlling the claustrophobia of the setting.

Unsworth's work reached perhaps its widest audience with one of his final projects, Richard Donner's Superman in 1978. Here he was responsible for integrating the work of a who's-who of cinematographers and visual effects designers with the plausibility and sense of grandeur befitting a (mostly) reverent take on a superhero. In fact the style he developed alongside director Donner was essentially that of a science-fiction period film; the glamorous, often highly diffused lensing observed a panoply of images of Americana, suggesting an epic timeframe for the film's scenes, a mythic America somewhere between the 1930s of the original comics and the 1970s. The style of the sequences that did not involve extensive science-fiction had to match scenes displaying Superman's extraordinary powers. One example of Unsworth's technique matching the epic style of the film with the "verisimilitude" of its more improbable aspects is seen in the flight sequences, where actors were suspended by cables in front of a front-projection screen. Both the romantic interpretation of the scenes -- and of a man's flight generally -- and the need to de-emphasize the wires made Unsworth's trademark filtered style utterly appropriate given the expense involved in retouching. Instead, especially considering the state of visual effects in the mid-1970s, the frames look surprisingly natural, so much so that the film's promoters were about to boast, "You'll believe that a man can fly." Unsworth was not named in the Special Achievement in Visual Effects Academy Award the film received, but as Director of Photography, and without a separate credit for special effects work, he would not have been eligible.

Death struck Unsworth at the height of his skill and reputation. He died of a heart attack in France at age 64 while filming Roman Polanski's Tess in 1978, the film for which he won his second Academy Award. His first was for Cabaret in 1972. Both Superman and The First Great Train Robbery were dedicated to his memory. As alluded in the Superman dedication, Unsworth was an Officer in the Order of the British Empire.

He was also admired for his charming manner at work. For instance, Margot Kidder was flattered when he arranged lighting for her shots and insisted on concentration by saying, "Quiet, I'm lighting the Lady." His wife, Maggie Unsworth, worked in the British film industry, often as a script/continuity supervisor.

Selected filmography

• The People's Land (1943)
• The Man Within (1947)
• Jassy (1947)
• Scott of the Antarctic (1948)
• The Blue Lagoon (1949)
• Trio (1950)
• Where No Vultures Fly (1951)
• The Clouded Yellow (1951)
• The Planter's Wife (1952)
• The Million Pound Note (1953)
• The Purple Plain (1954)
• The Seekers (1954)
• A Town Like Alice (1956)
• Hell Drivers (1957)
• A Night to Remember (1958)
• North West Frontier (1959)
• On the Double (1961)
• The 300 Spartans (1962)
• Becket (1964)
• Othello (1965)
• Genghis Khan (1965)
• Half a Sixpence (1967)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• The Assassination Bureau (1969)
• The Reckoning (1969)
• Three Sisters (1970)
• Cromwell (1970)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972)
• Cabaret (1972)
• Baxter! (1973)
• Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
• The Abdication (1974)
• Zardoz (1974)
• Lucky Lady (1975)
• Royal Flash (1975)
• The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)
• A Bridge Too Far (1977)
• Superman (1978)
• The First Great Train Robbery (1978)
• Tess (1979)

External links

• BFI: British Film Institute website
• Geoffrey Unsworth at the Internet Movie Database

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