Cinematographer Conrad Hall Dies

The Oscar-winning cinematographer of American Beauty and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Conrad L. Hall, has died at the age of 76. Succumbing to complications of bladder cancer in a Santa Monica hospital on Saturday, Hall filmed nearly three dozen movies in a career that stretched 50 years. Best known for his sun-tinged Western expanses of 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for which he won his first Oscar, Hall's most recent success came when he teamed up with movie new boy Sam Mendes for the fantasy fuelled American Beauty; a collaboration which saw him bag his second Academy Award. So successful was their American Beauty teaming that Mendes recruited Hall to create the rain-soaked, funereal darkness of his second film Road to Perdition; a stunning achievement which has already been tipped to carry away the Best Cinematography Oscar for Hall this March. Tributes to his talent have flooded in from all corners of the industry. Producer Richard D. Zanuck told Variety, "Every film that he worked on was something beautiful to the eye, and very imaginative. With Road to Perdition you could virtually take every frame of his work and blow it up and hang it over your fireplace. It was like Rembrandt at work." "I'm devastated," said Sam Mendes. "Conrad was not only one of the greatest cinematographers who ever lived but was also a wonderful man who touched everyone he worked with. I will miss him more than I can say, both as a collaborator and as a friend."