Guy Green, 91; Cinematographer Turned Director

Guy Green, a postwar British cinematographer who won an Academy Award for his black-and-white filming of director Sir David Lean’s “Great Expectations” and later directed “A Patch of Blue,” has died. He was 91.

Green, a co-founder of the British Society of Cinematographers, died early Thursday at his Beverly Hills home after a long illness, said his wife, Jo.

“Guy was a leading figure in cinema both in the U.K. and in the United States for over 40 years,” actor/director Richard Attenborough, a longtime friend who worked with Green on several productions, said in a statement Thursday.

“I had the most profound respect for his remarkable talent. He was a great friend and will be sorely missed on both sides of the Atlantic,” Attenborough said.

Before Green became a director in 1954, his credits as a director of photography included films such as “Oliver Twist,” “The Way Ahead,” “Captain Horatio Hornblower RN,” “Passionate Friends” and “I Am a Camera.”

Among the best-known films he directed before working in the United States are “Sea of Sand,” “The Angry Silence” and “The Mark”. He went on to direct movies such as “Light in the Piazza,” “Diamond Head,” “A Walk in the Spring Rain” and “The Magus.”

As a director, Green was proudest of his work on “A Patch of Blue,” a 1965 interracial love story for which he wrote the screen adaptation of Elizabeth Kata’s novel.

The film, a sensitive drama about a blind girl falling in love with a black man, starred Sidney Poitier and Elizabeth Hartman. It earned five Academy Award nominations and won a supporting actress Oscar for Shelley Winters, who played Hartman’s bigoted mother.

“It was a courageous film,” Poitier told The Times on Thursday. The movie, he said, was “a comment on American society at that time,” one that “accentuated the need for human beings to have respect for each other’s culture.... Over and above that, he was speaking of his view of the family.”

Poitier said Green “was a remarkable person both as an artist and as a human being. We worked together that one time and have been friends throughout the subsequent years. That’s because I was impressed with him in both areas.”

Green’s screenplay for “A Patch of Blue” also was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. And he received a nomination from the Directors Guild of America and nominations from the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. for best director and best screenplay.

Born in the Somerset town of Frome, England, in 1913, Green fell in love with movies at an early age.

He later recalled spending so much time watching silent movies -- westerns in particular -- that his mother would have to go to the theater and bring him home.

He later worked as a projectionist on ocean liners, served as a clapper boy for a company that made advertising films and ran a portrait studio in London before entering the British film industry at the age of 20. He worked his way up from camera assistant to camera operator and then director of photography.

During World War II, he was the camera operator for “In Which We Serve,” the patriotic documentary-like war drama co-directed by Lean and Sir Noel Coward.

During the making of the 1942 film, Jo Green told The Times on Thursday, Lean sent Green out to get shots on board a battleship.

Before he left, Lean told him, “Don’t forget, if you’re getting bombed from the air, be sure you get a good shot of the plane.”

Her husband, she said, “went on battleships and got stranded somewhere in Africa -- lots of adventures.”

He did such a good job on the film, she said, that when director Carol Reed told Lean that he needed a cinematographer for his next film and asked if he had any suggestions, Lean said, “Why don’t you use Guy?”

Green’s first film as a cinematographer was Reed’s 1944 war drama “The Way Ahead.”

He went on to shoot the classic “Great Expectations” for Lean, whom he had first met when Lean was an editor.

In a 2000 interview with Daily Variety, Green said, “I’ve had some great advantages,” speaking of the talented filmmakers who had nurtured his career.

As for the success of “Great Expectations,” he credited the “very dramatic story by Charles Dickens, lovely set designs by John Bryan and, of course, David Lean, one of the great directors.”

With “Great Expectations,” Green in 1948 became the first British director of cinematography to win an Oscar for best black-and-white cinematography.

“The strange thing was he didn’t know he’d gotten an Oscar,” Jo Green recalled. “In those days communications were just so different. He didn’t know he had been nominated until he went into the camera department at Denham Studios the day after the Oscars, and the head of the department said, ‘Oh, by the way, did you know you got the Oscar last night for ‘Great Expectations?’ ”

In 1949, Green, Freddie Young, Jack Cardiff and others founded the British Society of Cinematographers.

After more than a decade of crisscrossing the Atlantic for his film work, Green and his family moved to Los Angeles full time in 1978.

Green, whose honors included the American Society of Cinematographers’ Presidents Award in 2000, also received a special award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2001 for his outstanding contribution to world cinema.

And last year, the British government awarded him the Order of the British Empire for his work in the film industry.

In addition to his wife of 57 years, he is survived by his son, Michael; his daughter, Marilyn Feldman; and two grandchildren.

A funeral service is pending.