- Famous for never using a light meter on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
- Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 34th Cannes International Film Festival in 1981.
- He was awarded the O.B.E. (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2008 Queen's New Years Honors List for his services to the film industry.
- Spent 17 + years as a cameraman at Ealing Studios filming many classics such as 'Kind Hearts and Coronets', 'Lavender Hill Mob' and 'The Man in the White Suit'.
- He spent part of his upbringing in France as his journalist father, George Edward Slocombe (1894-1963), was Paris correspondent for the Daily Herald. His mother, Marie (née Karlinsky), was Russian, and married his father in London in 1912.
- He won BAFTA Awards in 1964, 1975, and 1979, and was nominated for an Academy Award on three occasions.
- Slocombe initially intended to become a photojournalist, and as a young photographer, he witnessed the early events leading up to the outbreak of World War II.
- He was commissioned by American film-maker Herbert Kline to film events for a documentary called Lights Out, covering a Goebbels rally and the burning of a synagogue, for which he was briefly arrested.
- Slocombe was a British cinematographer, particularly known for his work at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the first three Indiana Jones films.
- He found widescreen equipment sometimes restrictive, finding the Technirama camera system used on Davy (1958) "a block of flats" and difficult to compose shots with.
- He graduated in mathematics from the Sorbonne.
- The style of the film"Saraband for Dead Lovers", about a doomed extramarital affair in 17th-century Germany, was variously praised as unconventional and criticised for being excessively symbolic, while also leaving exterior and interior shots poorly matched.
- In his later years, he lived in West London with his daughter, his only child.
- He was particularly praised for his flexible, high-contrast cinematography for the horror film Dead of Night (1945), and for his bright, colourful West Country summer landscapes on The Titfield Thunderbolt.
- He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2008 New Year Honours, and attended a BAFTA dinner in his honour in 2009.
- For "Saraband for Dead Lovers" (1948), shot in Technicolor, the production team settled on a muted, gloomy style unusual for the time, which Slocombe in 2015 considered as among his best work of the period.
- Apart from filming, Slocombe worked also on developing plans for shots, visiting prisoner-of-war camps in Germany as part of pre-production for The Captive Heart (1946).
- Slocombe would later speak approvingly of Ealing's culture of script development. However, he also noted that its restrictive studio system headed by Michael Balcon, in which outside work was not normally permitted, made it impractical for him to attempt to begin a career as a director, something which he had considered.
- Slocombe personally regarded Basil Dearden as the "most competent" of the directors he worked with at Ealing.
- Not all reviews of his later colour work were favourable: while his cinematography on Never Say Never Again (1983) has been described by one author as "subtle, subdued...it creates a mellow mood", it has also been assessed as "muddled and brown".
- Slocombe experienced problems with his vision from the 1980s onwards, including a detached retina in one eye and complications from unsuccessful laser eye surgery in the other, and was nearly blind at the end of his life.
- Janusz Kaminski, cinematographer on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, said that he deliberately shot the film to emulate Slocombe's visuals, in order to create an appearance of continuity with the previous pictures.
- A special effect shot he created was a scene in Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Alec Guinness, playing eight different characters, appeared as six of them simultaneously in the same frame. By masking the lens and locking the camera down in one place, the film was re-exposed several times with Guinness in different places on the set over several days. Slocombe recalled sleeping in the studio to make sure nobody touched the camera.
- Despite his blindness, Slocombe remained able to give interviews into his last years, and was interviewed by David A. Ellis in a book entitled Conversations with Cinematographers, in 2011 by French television in French, by the BBC on the invasion of Poland in 2014, and on the history of British films in 2015. He was quoted in the latter interview as saying "it's a weird feeling to have outlived virtually everyone you ever worked with.".
- Roger Ebert particularly praised his work on Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), writing that it "achieves a color range that glows with life and somehow doesn't make the desert look barren.".
- Slocombe was in Warsaw with a movie camera on 1 September 1939 when Germany invaded. Accompanied by Herbert Kline, he escaped, but his train was machine-gunned by a German aeroplane. After escaping from the train, Slocombe and Kline bought a horse and cart from a Polish farm, finally returning to London via Latvia and Stockholm.
- Slocombe became a cinematographer for the Ministry of Information, shooting footage of Atlantic convoys with the Fleet Air Arm.
- In the 1980s, he worked with Steven Spielberg on the first three Indiana Jones films, after Spielberg enjoyed working with him as an auxiliary cinematographer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
- He developed a relationship with Ealing Studios, where filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti, who helped him obtain his position, worked. Some of his photography was used as second unit material for fiction films.
- One criticism of Slocombe was that he didn't have a signature style. His versatility, though, was a sign of his strength.
- When work on a French Alexander Korda production did not materialise because he lacked a work permit and his hopes of joining a Gainsborough Studios apprenticeship scheme were dashed, Slocombe ended up as a junior news editor at British United Press in London for three years, also writing (from London) a Paris newsletter under a pseudonym.
- His two preoccupations were film and journalism. His childhood passion, photography, begun at the age of seven with a Kodak Box Brownie.
- He also led a far more colourful life than most of those in front of his camera. As a 2010 Bafta tribute to him revealed, the 10-year-old Slocombe had met James Joyce.
- When he was in his twenties he increasingly sold his pictures internationally and this prompted him to set up on his own as a stills photographer in advertising, meanwhile still selling to magazines such as Picture Post, Life and Paris Match and writing articles and short stories.
- A former journalist he covered the German invasion of Poland and Holland.
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