Guy Green later worked as a projectionist on ocean liners, served as
a clapper boy for an advertising company and ran a portrait studio in
London before entering the film industry as a camera assistant. From
1944 Green became a full director of photography. His specialty was
brooding, cloud-swept period pieces like Blanche
Fury (1947) and the David
Lean films Oliver
Twist (1948), The
Passionate Friends (1949), Madeleine
(1950) and Great
Expectations (1946), for which Green’s stunning black-and-white
earned him an Academy Award
In 1954, he became a director with the modest but attractively shot
River Boat
(1954). Two of his best known directing efforts were the British films
Sea
of Sand (1958) and The
Angry Silence (1960), first conceived with actors
Richard Attenborough and Michael
Craig. Green's finest work as a director can be seen in such 1960s
dramas as The Mark (1961) and Oscar-winning interracial love story A
Patch of Blue (1965), each of which centred on a profoundly disturbed
social outcast.
Once in Hollywood, Green abandoned the austerity of his earlier works
in favour of the garishly budgeted and ponderously executed The Magus
(1968) and Jacqueline Susann's Once is Not Enough (1975). In 1985, Guy
Green made his American TV-movie bow with Strong Medicine. A founding
member of the British Society of Cinematographers, he was awarded the
O.B.E. in the 2004 for his services to film.
