Billy Williams obituary

The Guardian

2 days ago

The cinematographer Billy Williams, who has died aged 96, was Oscar-nominated for Ken Russell's adaptation of Women in Love (1969) and the sentimental tearjerker On Golden Pond (1982), which starred two generations of Fondas, Henry and his daughter Jane, acting together for the first time, alongside Katharine Hepburn.
He finally won the Oscar for Richard Attenborough's biopic Gandhi (1981), sharing the prize with Ronnie Taylor, who stepped in for him when he had to twice withdraw from the production due to a slipped disc. They each completed around 10 weeks' work on the movie.
Williams and Taylor used newsreel footage as a visual guide for Gandhi, which won seven other Oscars including best picture. He had gone out to India with Ben Kingsley before shooting began. While the actor fasted, Williams familiarised himself with the extensive Indian crew. Challenges during shooting included the hot, dusty conditions and the logistics of marshalling crowd scenes with thousands of extras.
A few weeks before starting on Gandhi, Williams had been on location in idyllic New Hampshire shooting On Golden Pond. Hepburn, said Williams, was 'absolutely delightful. She was very opinionated … a driving force, an absolute dynamo … feisty and determined to get things her own way.'
Williams's cinematography on Women in Love, adapted by Larry Kramer from DH Lawrence's novel, represented him at his most adventurous. He called it 'the best visual script I ever had', explaining that it offered 'all the opportunities that a cinematographer could wish for'.
These included day and night interiors and exteriors, as well as one sequence shot during the 'magic hour' (the time after sunrise or before sunset), another in the snow, and an abundance of candlelight and firelight. 'It was a very broad and interesting palette to work with. Ken was in agreement with me that we should go for very strong colour effects like the colour of firelight, which is very orange.'
Though brilliantly textured, staged and performed throughout, the film is still best remembered for its naked fireside wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. For this, Williams filtered all the lamps on set to be the same colour then created a flickering effect. Reed and Bates were fully nude for an entire day of shooting, then filmed from the waist up for another. Williams shot with a hand-held camera to allow more freedom to follow the action, and to infuse the scene with additional energy.
By the time the editor insisted it needed an extra element, the location was no longer available. Russell and Williams reconvened in a studio with the actors, prioritising tight close-ups of them on the rug. 'By using the same techniques of lighting, and shooting everything close, it cut together closely,' Williams said.
Russell's take on Lawrence combined period drama with a modern sensibility. 'Billy Williams's cinematography and Shirley Russell's costume design fuse 1920s and 60s aesthetics, linking the screen adaptation to the roaring 20s spirit and the 60s bohemian/ counter-cultural mindset,' wrote Caroline Longhurst.
In short order, Williams shot Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), John Schlesinger's groundbreaking study of a bisexual love triangle; Zee & Co (1972), scripted by Edna O'Brien and starring Michael Caine and Elizabeth Taylor, the latter also appearing in one of Williams's next films, the thriller Night Watch (1973); and John Milius's Moroccan adventure The Wind and the Lion (1975), with Sean Connery, in which Williams also had a small role as a British consul. 'I had an action scene where I had to do a lot of shooting with an automatic [at] Berbers who were intent on kidnapping Candice Bergen,' he said. 'That was a departure for me.'
The son of Ada and Billy Williams, he was born in Walthamstow, east London. His father had been a cinematographer since 1910, and took on his son, who left school at 14, as an apprentice. Billy Jr worked with his father for four years, including a stint making educational films in Kenya and Uganda for the Colonial Film Unit.
At 18, he became a photographer for two years with the RAF as part of his national service. He then worked for British Transport Films before travelling to Iraq to shoot the documentary Rivers of Time (1955). He would later shoot one scene in that country for the prologue to The Exorcist, his sole contribution to the 1973 horror hit.
Williams was hired by Television Advertising in London, where he met directors including Russell and Schlesinger, and made his feature debut with the comedy San Ferry Ann (1965). When the original cinematographer refused to take the medical required by the producers, Russell hired Williams to shoot the thrillingly stylish Billion Dollar Brain (1967), starring Caine in his third outing as Harry Palmer. Set in Helsinki, it was filmed there and at Pinewood, giving Williams his daunting first experience of working on large studio sets.
His eclectic CV included the brilliantly twisted Hitchcockian thriller The Silent Partner (1978) and the sumptuous western Eagle's Wing (1979). He did excellent work for Peter Hyams on Eleni (1985), set during the Greek civil war, and Suspect (1987), with Cher as an attorney defending a homeless man (Liam Neeson) accused of murder. The Rainbow (1989) reunited Williams with Russell for another Lawrence adaptation, this time with Glenda Jackson playing Anna Brangwen, the mother of her Women in Love character Gudrun.
Not everything turned out so well. Saturn 3 (1980), directed by Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain), scripted by Martin Amis and featuring an incongruously naked Kirk Douglas, later parodied by Amis in his novel Money, was rightly regarded as a disaster. Williams's most arduous undertaking was Shadow of the Wolf (1992), made in Montreal during a savage winter. 'We were shooting in extreme cold,' he said. 'That was difficult and we weren't rewarded with a good film at the end of it.'
His final film before retiring was Driftwood (1997). Starring James Spader and shot in Ireland, it was memorably described by Variety magazine as a 'low-key drama about a female wacko who holds a shipwrecked man prisoner in her remote dwelling'.
Williams was appointed OBE in 2009. His wife, Anne (nee Pearce), whom he married in 1957, died in 2024. He is survived by their four daughters, Clare, Helen, Jo and Kate, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Billy (William Desmond) Williams, cinematographer, born 3 June 1929; died 21 May 2025