Freddie Francis

Film director and cinematographer
Born December 22, 1917
Died March 17, 2007

Sometimes you can call up the Internet Movie Database, enter a single name and get a list of credits that you know are the merged achievements of two different people who just happen to share the same name. It looks that way when you enter the name Freddie Francis.

First there is Freddie Francis, the two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer, who shot the British classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and ended up in Hollywood on prestige projects such as the Civil War epic Glory (1989) and Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991).

And then there is Freddie Francis, a director who made a couple of dozen British and European horror movies with such titles as Torture Garden (1967), The Creeping Flesh (1973) and The Ghoul (1975).

There seems little common ground, and yet they are one and the same person. Francis, who has died aged 89, had one of the most remarkable careers in the history of British cinema.

He started off as a stills photographer and clapper-boy, became one of Britain's top cinematographers and then one of Britain's leading horror directors, working regularly with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

But Francis never wanted to be a horror director. And when he was unable to get work directing other films, he quit and did nothing for years until David Lynch lured him back to provide the vivid black-and-white cinematography on his Victorian-era drama, The Elephant Man (1980).

"People were warning him, Oh, you shouldn't get Freddie because he hasn't done a film for 20 years'," Francis later recalled.

The Elephant Man began what is arguably the most distinguished chapter in Francis's career - though horror fans would certainly disagree.

He was born Frederick William Francis in London in 1917 and studied engineering before entering the film industry in 1934. During the Second World War he got the chance to write, shoot, direct and edit Army training and information films. After the war he worked on several films as camera operator for Powell and Pressburger, and John Huston.

He was director of photography on the second unit for Huston's Technicolor adaptation of Moby Dick (1956), though it was with atmospheric black-and-white cinematography that Francis came to the fore as a DOP on Room at the Top (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Sons and Lovers (both 1960).

The new strain of British social-realist films was attracting international acclaim at a time when Hollywood had embraced colour. Sons and Lovers brought Francis his first Oscar, though he heard of his win only when he received a call from a friend in Canada who had been watching it on television.

He came to Edinburgh to shoot the Peter Sellers comedy The Battle of the Sexes (1959) and his skilful manipulation of light, shade, tone and atmosphere was put to particularly effective use in The Innocents (1961), an adaptation of Henry James's ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. It was an indication of the course his career would take as a director.

His first directorial credit came on the romantic comedy Two and Two Make Six (1962), but he quickly got into a run of horror films and psycho-thrillers with Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) and Dr Terror's House of Horrors, in which Peter Cushing meets five strangers on a train and tells their fortunes with Tarot cards.

It created a fashion for "portmanteau" horror films, which presented a series of stories, often linked by a creepy narrator. The sub-genre - and the title - were affectionately spoofed by Steve Coogan on his TV series Dr Terrible's House of Horrible (2001). Francis himself directed two more such films - Torture Garden and Tales from the Crypt (1972).

His son, Kevin, followed him into the business and cut his teeth (so to speak) on Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), on which he worked as a runner (general assistant). Kevin later became a producer and his father directed Legend of the Werewolf and The Ghoul (both 1975).

But Francis was growing increasingly unhappy working in a genre which lacked critical respectability and which he did not particularly like. "The main reasons I got out of the horror genre were first that I never really wanted to get into it," he told Sight and Sound magazine in 1992. "Those were the only films I was being offered as a director."

The Elephant Man was the first of three films with David Lynch and was followed by Dune (1984) and The Straight Story (1999). Suddenly he was back in demand with top directors in the UK and US.

The Elephant Man brought Francis the first of four Bafta nominations, with further nods for The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Glory (1989) - for which he won his second Oscar (this time he was there to get it) - and Cape Fear (1991). Shamefully, for the British film industry, he never won a British Academy Award.

He is survived by his son, Kevin, his second wife, Pamela, their two children and six grandchildren.