Billy Williams, Oscar-winning British cinematographer whose credits included Gandhi and Women in Love

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2 days ago

Billy Williams, who has died aged 95, was one of the leading British cinematographers across four decades, winning an Oscar for his work on Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982).
Exactly a year earlier he had missed out by a hair's breadth on scooping an Academy Award for the autumnal geriatric drama On Golden Pond (1981), starring Henry and Jane Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. But in April 1983 Williams received the gold statuette – shared with Ronnie Taylor – as one of the eight Oscars garnered by that epic film.
It was the culmination of a long and often painful collaboration that for Williams had begun three years earlier when, in a short telegram reply to Attenborough's request for him to join the creative team on Gandhi, he wrote: 'Dear Dickie. Yes. Love Billy.'
Williams enjoyed telling the a story of informing Katharine Hepburn that 'Richard Attenborough would like me to shoot Gandhi for him,' to which the actress replied: 'I think he's already dead, Billy.'
The production, which was shot over six months, was fraught with logistical problems during filming in India – from the endless dust which unless swiftly checked would form like cement on the camera equipment, to problems obtaining official permission to shoot inside various key government buildings.
Then, six weeks into filming, Williams slipped a disc and had to fly back to the UK. With his blessing, his duties were handed over to Ronnie Taylor, who had worked as a camera operator on two of Attenborough's earlier films. Taylor filmed for a month before Williams returned – only to suffer another slipped disc a month later, replaced once more by Taylor.
By the time the production returned for its final weeks in the UK, Williams had recovered and completed the film, which included shooting in Staines Town Hall, doubling for the court house in Ahmedabad where Gandhi's 'Great Trial' had taken place in 1922, and at the Institute of Directors building in Pall Mall for a key interior sequence begun months earlier on the long steps leading up to the old Viceroy's House (now the presidential palace) in New Delhi.
Williams had earned his first Oscar nomination a decade earlier for an altogether more intimate drama, Ken Russell's Women in Love (1970), featuring the much talked-about nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed.
'Photographically, it was the best opportunity I've ever had in terms of what the script was offering,' Williams recalled. 'It had every kind of challenge. Apart from the usual day and night interiors and exteriors, there was candlelight, snow scenes, dusk and dawn, and that nude wrestling scene. Bates and Reed agreed to be fully nude for one day only, on a closed set. After that they'd only do waist-upwards scenes.'
Billy Williams was born on June 3 1929 in Walthamstow, east London. His father, also Billy, was one of Britain's great pioneering cameramen, who shot the surrender of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow, covered the trailblazing Cape Town-to-Cairo truck expedition, and was the first man to film from the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro.
When young Billy left school at 14 he was offered a choice of jobs: working in a city brokerage for one of his mother's in-laws, or as an assistant to his father. There was no contest. After working some years for Billy Snr, he broke away and joined British Transport Films, before moving into commercials when all attempts at graduating to features failed.
Working on ads with successful film directors like John Schlesinger, Ken Russell and Ted Kotcheff paid off when Williams managed to make it into long-form drama with Russell on the spy thriller The Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the second sequel to The Ipcress File, then on Women in Love. The Schlesinger connection also paid dividends handsomely in 1971 with Sunday Bloody Sunday, a daring – for its day – and intimate drama of homosexual love, which earned Williams one of his four Bafta nominations.
Williams continued to shoot films, including the award-winning Western, The Eagle's Wing (1979) and Dreamchild (1985). He retired after Driftwood (1997).
During and after his career as a cinematographer, he taught cinematography at workshops in the US, Germany, Ireland and Hungary, and in the UK at the National Film & Television School in Beaconsfield. One of his regular teaching colleagues was another great cinematographer, the Hungarian-American Vilmos Zsigmond. When Zsigmond declared himself unavailable to shoot On Golden Pond, co-starring Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, he paved the way for Williams to notch up one of his most memorable international credits.
'Around that time,' he recalled, 'Vilmos was very much into flashing the film to soften the image, and using various filters to take the contrast away. The director Mark Rydell was very keen I should do something like that, too. I wasn't, though, because I didn't like the idea of the film looking too chocolate-boxy, too soft and sentimental. I thought the actors [Henry Fonda was 76 playing 80, Hepburn 72] should look their age.'
Eventually, he managed to persuade Rydell to do away with filters altogether, apart from a 'very fine black net on the extreme close-ups of Hepburn and Jane Fonda'. Henry Fonda and Hepburn went on to win Academy Awards for their performances, in Fonda's case posthumously.
Williams's other notable contributions to cinema history included shooting the atmospheric 11-minute opening sequence in Iraq for The Exorcist (1973). Tall and distinguished-looking, he was perhaps unique among cinematographers in appearing front-of-camera in major Hollywood movies – first, as a British vice-consul shot down by Sean Connery's North African Berber tribesmen in John Milius's period adventure The Wind and the Lion (1975), and then as an expert witness in Suspect (1987), Peter Yates's courtroom thriller starring Cher and Liam Neeson.
He served as president of the British Society of Cinematographers from 1977 to 1979 and was appointed OBE in 2009.
Billy Williams and his wife Anne had four daughters.
Billy Williams, born June 3 1929, died May 20 2025
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