With a career spanning over 80 years and over 130 films, it’s not surprising that Freddie Young was considered one of the great filmcraft technicians of the twentieth century. He is best known for the brilliant spectacle of his color films with David Lean—Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Ryan’s Daughter (1970)—for which he won an Oscar apiece. However, he was also one of the pioneers of the visual language of film in the UK in the 1930s and 1940s and invented the process of pre-exposing color film to mute the colors (“pre-fogging”) for Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair in 1966.
He was born in 1902 and entered the film industry at the age of 15 in 1917 as a teaboy at Gaumont Studios in west London. He progressed up the ladder as laboratory assistant, camera assistant, focus puller, assistant film editor, then lighting cameraman. He had his first cinematography credit on The Flag Lieutenant in 1926 and in 1929 went under contract at MGM British Studios in Elstree under Herbert Wilcox. His credits in the 1930s included several films starring Anna Neagle, Wilcox’s wife, including Nell Gwynn (1934), Victoria the Great (1937), Limelight (1937), and Nurse Edith Cavell (1939). He also shot the classic 1939 weepie Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Throughout World War II and late 1940s, he shot some fine films of the period including Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel (1941), Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) for which he shot second unit desert work in Egypt, Anthony Asquith’s The Winslow Boy (1948) and George Cukor’s Edward, My Son (1949).
Shooting by now in color, he spent much of the 1950s in foreign climes on glorious lush epics for the Hollywood studios like Ivanhoe (1952), Mogambo (1953), Knights of the Round Table (1953), Bhowani Junction (1956), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) and Solomon and Sheba (1959). He even brought the paintings of Van Gogh to life, shooting for Vincente Minnelli in Lust for Life (1956).
Lawrence Of Arabia marked a turning point for Young. Although 60 when the film was produced, it teamed him with director David Lean for the first time and the partnership would prove historic. The scene when Omar Sharif emerges from a mirage in the desert lasted three minutes and was shot using a 482mm lens which Young brought with him from the US It is arguably one of the most celebrated sequences in the twentieth century. Shooting of the film lasted over a year in Jordan, Morocco and Spain and it was the first time Young had shot using a cumbersome Super Panavision 70mm camera, requiring ingenuity in the harshest locations.
Doctor Zhivago followed in 1965, providing Young with new challenges including shooting Russian winter landscapes in Spain with fake snow and the city of Moscow on a set outside Madrid. The production was again punishing—lasting ten months in Spain, Finland and Canada—but it afforded Young a variety of styles from vibrant colors to near monochrome. It was shot in real anamorphic Panavision 35mm, but blown up to 70mm for worldwide release.
Young’s other credits included the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), Franklin Schaffner’s vast epic Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and, of course, Ryan’s Daughter with its stunning Irish sea storm. That was one of the last films to be shot in Super 65mm Panavision. The depth of detail and scale of composition that Young achieved in all these films has arguably never been replicated, and genuinely cannot be fully appreciated on a small screen.
01 With David Lean on the set of Ryan’s Daughter
02 Doctor Zhivago
03 Lawrence of Arabia
04 Doctor Zhivago
05 Ryan’s Daughter
