Charles Lang; Won Oscar for ‘A Farewell to Arms’

Charles Lang, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer who set standards for his craft in more than 50 motion pictures during half a century behind the camera, has died. He was 96.

Lang, who was also variously credited as Charles B. Lang, Charles Lang Jr. and Charles B. Lang Jr., died April 3 of pneumonia at St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, officials said Monday.

Nominated for Oscars 18 times over four decades, Lang won his only statuette in 1933 for the film “A Farewell to Arms,” starring Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper. He also earned the American Society of Cinematographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.

Only two years after he was first credited as a director of photography, Lang received his initial Oscar nomination for the 1931 film “The Right to Love.” His final nomination was for his penultimate picture, the 1972 film “Butterflies Are Free.”

Self-described as a “women’s photographer,” Lang became known early for his genius with lighting and camera movement that made actresses look their best.

When he first filmed Marlene Dietrich in “Desire,” he mastered the precise lighting requirements that she had learned from Josef von Sternberg, noting that the actress was “good-natured, wonderful” in instructing him.

“It was glamour lighting, not realistic, but great,” he told The Times in 1972 when he was retiring. “She knew where that light should be: a long way off and way up high.”

Besides Hayes and Dietrich, other leading ladies who benefited from Lang’s lens included Ruth Chatterton, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, Claudette Colbert, Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman. His favorites were Hayes and Hepburn.

“Helen Hayes and Audrey have an inner beauty, an inner goodness that comes out on the screen,” he said in 1972. “Audrey Hepburn is one of the most lovable people I have ever known . . . a great actress, in my opinion.”

But film historian and author Tom Stempel said Monday that Lang was known for making more than actresses look stunning--Cary Grant and the city of Paris as well as Hepburn, for example, in the 1963 thriller “Charade.”

Stempel said Lang was particularly praised for his efforts to make lighting and cinematography serve the total motion picture rather than his own art, as in the scenes moving from bright sunlight to darkness of a cave in the Billy Wilder’s 1951 film “Ace in the Hole.” Stempel said Lang’s cinematography of “The Magnificent Seven” in 1960 with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen became the prototype for wide-screen westerns to come.

Lang shot four of Wilder’s films, and received Academy Award nominations for three of them--”A Foreign Affair,” “Sabrina” and “Some Like It Hot.”

“He was so imaginative, so inventive, so ahead of his time,” Lang said of Wilder. “He kind of likes to select photographers like he would actors.”

The cinematographer also worked for other legendary directors, including Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor and Mitchell Leisen.

Lang appeared in the 1992 documentary “Visions of Light: the Art of Cinematography.”

Born in Bluff, Utah, Lang moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 3, attended Lincoln High School and began pre-law studies at USC. Forced to drop out of college by the illness of his father, a studio laboratory technician, Lang began working in an East Los Angeles film laboratory.

He was quickly promoted and soon was working for director Cecil B. DeMille’s brother, William. Lang went with him to Paramount and stayed for more than two decades, and is credited with giving the studio’s films their softer, romanticized look in the 1930s and 1940s.

Lang is survived by his daughter, Judith Lang of Taos, N.M., three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.