Freddie Young

British cinematographer Freddie Young was in the film industry from the age of 15, picking up rent and food money with a variety of menial jobs. A lighting cameraman from the 1920s onward, Young hit his stride in the 1930s with such elaborately lensed pictures as Victoria the Great (1937) and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). Following war service, Young became one of a handful of British artisans who were as proficient with Technicolor as with black-and-white; he even managed to bring the paintings of Van Gogh to vibrant life with the pedestrian hues of Metrocolor in Lust for Life (1956). Young was best known in the 1960s for his long association with director David Lean, winning Oscars for his work on Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). While many of his contemporaries urged Young to become a director himself, it wasn't until he turned 82 that Young directed his first and only film, the made-for-TV Arthur's Hallowed Ground (1983). In the late autumn of 1998, Young was putting the finishing touches on his memoirs and the book Seventy Light Years: A Life in the Movies when he passed away of natural causes in London. Freddie Young was the only person to have been named a Fellow of the British Academy for Film & Television Arts (an honor accorded him in 1972) since Alfred Hitchcock.

~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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