Douglas Slocombe: Cinematographer whose six-decade career took in newsreels, Ealing films and the Indiana Jones series

His work from the Ealing period included Rossellini-like elements, a heavy use of chiaroscuro that recalled German horror films and an extreme fluidity and energy reminiscent of silent slapstick comedy

Slocombe, centre, during a visit from Elizabeth Taylor and her husband, fellow actor Michael Wilding, to the set of the 1953 Ealing comedy ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ (Everett/Rex Features)

“I thought he could do anything,” Steven Spielberg marvelled at the British cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe, when he hired him to work on the Indiana Jones films. It was true. Slocombe has arguably the most varied filmography of any cinematographer in British or American film history.

From the neo-realist street scenes of kids running amok in post-war London in Ealing's Hue And Cry to the grim bedsit world of The L-Shaped Room and the sophisticated London of Joseph Losey's The Servant; from the overblown visions of Ken Russell (Glenda Jackson going mad in a lunatic asylum in The Music Lovers) to the harum-scarum action of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Slocombe filmed it all. He could seemingly switch styles as easily as he could change lenses.

He also led a far more colourful life than most of those in front of his camera. As a 2010 Bafta tribute to him revealed, the 10-year-old Slocombe had met James Joyce. At the time, he was living in Paris where his father, George Slocombe, was a correspondent for The Daily Herald and later wrote for the Evening Standard. Slocombe Snr was a distinguished reporter one of whose first assignments had been to report on the sinking of the Titanic. His mother was Russian. In Paris, Slocombe's intrepid journalist father had befriended such figures as Joyce, whose Ulysses he described in a review as a “staggering feat”, and Sinclair Lewis.

Slocombe was born in 1913 and spent much of his childhood in Paris. Taking his cue from his father, when he returned to Britain in the 1930s, he started his career as a reporter and photojournalist, working for such publications as Life and Paris-Match and eventually graduating to newsreel footage.

Slocombe had a knack for being in the eye of the storm. He was there filming the Nazis in the late 1930s (the noise of his camera once made Goebbels pause mid-speech during a rally.) Young Slocombe was briefly imprisoned for having the temerity to shoot the burning of a synagogue. He was even there with his camera when the Nazis invaded Poland.

During the war, Slocombe began his long association with Ealing Studios, at first contributing newsreel footage and then beginning to shoot fictional features. Richard Attenborough later suggested that thanks to his newsreel work, “he brought a reality, he took away the theatricality” of the lighting of films.

Slocombe's work for Ealing in itself would have guaranteed his reputation as one of the great cinematographers in British film history. There is a tendency to regard Ealing, under its patrician boss Michael Balcon, as a company specialising only in a very specific style of storytelling. “Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the British character,” read the words on the plaque put up at Ealing in 1955 when the studios were sold. Ealing made stuff upper-lipped war films and then, from the mid-1940s onwards, all those mildly subversive comedies in which small communities outmanoeuvred big, bad bureaucrats.

There may indeed have been an Ealing house style but Slocombe was still able to show his versatility. Shifting from horror (Dead Of Night) to comedy (The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man In The White Suit) to understated, issue-based drama (Alexander Mackendrick's masterpiece, Mandy), he was in his own way as much of a chameleon as the shape-shifting Alec Guinness playing multiple roles in Kind Hearts And Coronets. Look at his work from the Ealing period and you can find Rossellini-like elements, a heavy use of chiaroscuro that recalled German horror films and an extreme fluidity and energy reminiscent of silent slapstick comedy. Martin Scorsese was an avowed fan of his work, for example of the frenetic chase sequence on the staircase of the Eiffel Tower in The Lavender Hill Mob.

Slocombe spent so long at Ealing, and was so closely identified with the studios, that when Ealing closed there were obvious doubts that he would be able to emulate the work he had done there. In fact, he went on to supersede it. Stars loved working with him. Leslie Caron later claimed that she had never looked better than when Slocombe shot her in The L-Shaped Room. He knew how to make Diana Dors look very glamorous indeed and also how to show off Katharine Hepburn's regal features to best advantage.

He did astonishing work for Joseph Losey on The Servant. Losey's biographer David Caute writes of the virtuoso sustained shots that Losey and his trusted operator Chic Waterson contrived, many lasting for up to five minutes without cutting and involving 360-degree pans and use of mirrors. With its self-conscious stylisation, The Servant was a world away from the unfussy storytelling at Ealing, but Slocombe was at home in the new world of 1960s British cinema as he had been working with Balcon in the 1940s. He also proved that he was as adept working in studios as on location.

There was no snobbery about Slocombe. In the 1970s and '80s he proved his mettle as a Hollywood cameraman who could shoot big-budget action films. He was cinematographer on the First World War flying movie, The Blue Max, on Jack Clayton's lavish version of The Great Gatsby, Norman Jewison's testosterone-driven, futuristic sports film Rollerball and on the unofficial James Bond film, Never Say Never Again.

His real break (if it can be called such, given the vast experience he had already accrued) came when Spielberg hired him to shoot second unit footage for Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Spielberg was so impressed that Slocombe was brought on board for the Indiana Jones series. By then, Slocombe was in his 70s but still somehow found the energy to keep up with Spielberg, known for the relentless pace with which he shot his films. It helped that the British cinematographer was seemingly able to read the light without a meter.

One criticism of Slocombe was that he didn't have a signature style. He never won an Oscar, although he was nominated several times. His versatility, though, was a sign of his strength. So was his longevity. This is a man whose career behind the camera spanned more than half the history of the medium in which he was working.

Douglas Slocombe, cinematographer: born London 10 February 1913; OBE 2008; married Muriel (deceased; one daughter); died 22 February 2016.