Walter Lassally

BIOGRAPHY: A major figure in the British New Wave, Walter Lassally was born in Berlin, the son of an photographer of technical films. He arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and spent his early career working at a photography studio, an industrial documentary company and as a clapper boy at Butcher’s Film Service. He worked on documentaries for much of the 1950s and began a fruitful association as cinematographer with the Free Cinema directors Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, He remains best known for his feature film work with Richardson, for whom he shot A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner (1962) and Tom Jones (1963). But despite his association with British realist cinema, Lassally’s career has been remarkably international in scope, as the title of his biography, Itinerant Cameraman, suggests. His first feature film as a cinematographer was the Greek production A Girl in Black (1956), directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis. Lassally worked with Kakogiannis on several other projects, including Zorba the Greek (1964), for which he won an Academy Award. In later years he continued to work on Greek projects, and shot three films for the Merchant Ivory company, notably the Indian-set Heat and Dust (1982). 

Another biographical piece is located below as a pdf.