Obituaries : M. Krasner; Oscar-Winning Cameraman

Milton Krasner, a Brooklyn boy who parlayed a youthful interest in photography into an Academy Award while also filming many of the most successful pictures in modern Hollywood history, died Saturday at the Motion Picture Hospital in Woodland Hills.

The Oscar-winning cinematographer (for “Three Coins in the Fountain” in 1954) was 84, said his niece, Sharon Webster.

Krasner, who retired in the late 1970s after photographing the TV series “McMillan and Wife” for several years, entered pictures at age 17 as an assistant cameraman at the old Vitagraph and Biograph studios in New York.

His first full credit came in 1933 with “Strictly Personal” but he didn’t hit his stride until the mid-1940s when he was considered one of the better black-and-white photographers in the industry. He attained a similar reputation for color with the advent of CinemaScope and other wide-screen processes in the 1950s.

Over the years his films came to include “The Invisible Man,” some of the old Bud Abbott and Lou Costello and W.C. Fields films, “An Affair to Remember,” “All About Eve,” “The Woman in the Window,” “Demetrius and the Gladiators,” “The Seven Year Itch,” “Bells Are Ringing,” “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” “How the West Was Won,” “The Sandpiper,” and “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

In 1975 he was named to the American Society of Cinematographers’ Honor Roll for his lengthy achievements.

A widower, Krasner is survived by a son and a granddaughter.