My good friend Robin Browne, who has died aged 82, was a cinematographer specialising in aerial images and particular results. His was not a reputation in lights, however he persistently excelled with out the razzmatazz of Hollywood. I doubt there’s anybody who has seen considered one of his movies and never marvelled on the abilities and risks concerned.
He began out as a clapper boy within the late Nineteen Fifties, and labored on dozens of distinguished movies over the subsequent 5 a long time, as digital camera assistant, operator and as director of images main specialist items. Just a few titles give a flavour: Battle of Britain (1969); Catch 22 (1970); the tv sequence The Adventures of Black Magnificence (1972-74), on which he was digital camera operator for all 52 episodes; three Bond motion pictures within the Nineteen Seventies; A Bridge Too Far (1977); Krull (1983); A Passage to India (1984); The Jewel of the Nile (1985); King Kong Lives (1986); Gorillas within the Mist (1988); and Gifted Palms: The Ben Carson Story (2009).
For me, the one which takes the breath away, and is actually described as an epic, is the award-winning biopic Gandhi (1982), produced and directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley, on which Robin was in control of aerial images. Robin’s bywords – “go simple on the lighting and never an excessive amount of digital camera motion” – imbued the group scenes typically shot from above with particular affect.
He and I have been mates from boyhood. Robin was born, only a month after me, in Aylesbury, and later moved to north London, the place we went to Highgate faculty and grew up collectively. In these days there have been extra open fields than homes and we joined with one other good friend to kind the three musketeers. All our holidays have been preoccupied with adventures plotting the course of the Dollis brook by its many manifestations till it reached the Thames and setting challenges for one another to beat identified and imagined fears.
Robin’s mom, Diana (nee Mannering), was a well known vogue mannequin underneath the identify Diana Jones. His father was Bernard Browne, a director of images who labored with Alexander Korda at Denham studios; Robin was clearly proficient and destined for the movie world. He joined it as quickly as he might, at 16, with an apprenticeship at Merton Park Studios in south London earlier than transferring to work at Shepperton. Unusually he had a tiny darkish room at his house and I used to be capable of witness the mysteries of images, growth, and modifying at shut quarters. In school he ran the images membership.
He ended up settling within the US, transferring in 1991 to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, along with his spouse Judy (nee Doetze), whom he had married in 1978. This meant that he and I might meet much less typically, however we by no means misplaced contact. He was revered and well-known for his unassuming method, his caring generosity of spirit, his considerate and thoughtful mental strategy at work and at house.
Latterly he turned his hand to analysis into historic paperwork in preparation for a guide about to be accomplished referring to Shakespeare authorship and Francis Bacon. Undoubtedly Robin would have had plans to show it right into a novel movie.
He’s survived by Judy, and their kids, Justin and Debbie.
