 Winner of two Oscars and five BAFTAs, including one for 2001: A Space Odyssey (d. Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Geoffrey Unsworth entered films in his teens, spending five years at Gaumont-British (1932-37). He then joined Technicolor where he worked as assistant or operator on a number of notable British colour films, including The Drum (d. Zoltan Korda, 1938), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (d. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1943), A Matter of Life and Death (d. Powell & Pressburger, 1946). After his first feature as cinematographer, the dire musical, The Laughing Lady (d. Paul L.Stein, 1946), he worked on the Gainsborough melodramas, The Man Within and Jassy (both d. Bernard Knowles, 1947), his sombre use of colour oddly making these seem less 'colourful' than their black-and-white predecessors; and he had a similarly inclined collaborator in Guy Green on the handsomely subdued Blanche Fury (d. Marc Allégret, 1947). Working with Rank at Pinewood in the '50s, he shot exotically set adventures, such as The Seekers (d. Ken Annakin, 1954), glossy comedies like Value for Money (d. Annakin, 1955), moody black-and-white thrillers like Tiger in the Smoke (d. Roy Ward Baker, 1956), in which he makes the first half-hour genuinely scary in its evocation of a foggy underworld, and Hell Drivers (d. Cy Endfield, 1957), toughly redolent of Midlands quarries and lorries, and contributed to the documentary-like observational plainness of A Night to Remember (d. Roy Ward Baker, 1958). Subsequently, he was drawn to large-scale affairs like Becket (d. Peter Glenville, 1964), Cromwell (d. Ken Hughes, 1970), A Bridge Too Far (d. Richard Attenborough, 1977) and Superman (d. Richard Donner, 1978), on the one hand, and filmed theatre, such as Othello (d. Stuart Burge, 1965) and The Dance of Death (d. David Giles, 1968), on the other. He died in Brittany while filming Tess (d. Roman Polanski, 1979). He was awarded the OBE in1976. His wife, Maggie Unsworth, collaborated on the screenplay of Half a Sixpence (UK/US, d. George Sidney, 1967), which he shot, and also worked as a continuity person. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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