Roger Pratt, an Oscar-nominated British cinematographer best known for his work on Tim Burton‘s Batman and two Harry Potter films, has died. The British Society of Cinematographers confirmed Pratt’s death in a statement Friday, but did not specify an exact date of cause of death. Pratt was 77.
“It is with deepest sadness that we learn of the passing of our friend and colleague Roger Pratt BSC,” the statement read.
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Born in Leicester in 1947, Pratt’s interest in cinema began when he was a child. The son of a vicar, his father hosted annual church screenings of Fact and Faith Christian films produced by the Moody Institute of Science in Los Angeles.
“I was mesmerised by the annual showing of religious films in the church, at times like Christmas and especially Lent. A box full of rolls of film, projectors, screens, loudspeakers. The lights go out, the whirring of mechanics,” Pratt recalled, per a report from when he was given the society’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. “Then real people talking, moving, laughing, and dying (I mention dying because they were about Christ and his crucifixion).”
Pratt studied at the prestigious London Film School in the late ‘60s. After deciding that he didn’t want to direct, he pivoted his career to camera and editing work, receiving his first credit as a camera assistant in Bleak Moments (1971), directed by Mike Leigh. Just a few years later, in 1975, he worked as a clapper loader on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where Pratt formed what he called “a strange and close relationship” with frequent collaborator Terry Gilliam. He went on to work on a number of early-’80s short films and made his feature director of photography debut with The Sender in 1982.
His expansive body of work includes work on iconic films such as Mona Lisa (1986), High Hopes (1988), The Fisher King (1991), 12 Monkeys (1995), Frankenstein (1994), Troy (2004), 102 Dalmatians (2000), Iris (2001), Inkheart (2008), and The Karate Kid (2010). He was also a frequent collaborator of Richard Attenborough – Shadowlands (1993), In Love and War (1996), Grey Owl (1999), and Closing the Ring (2007) – and worked with the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Mike Leigh, Lasse Hallström, Wolfgang Petersen, and more. He is perhaps best known for his work on Burton’s 1989 Batman, as well as two Harry Potter movies – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005).
Pratt earned an Academy Award nomination for Neil Jordan’s The End of the Affair (1999), two Bafta nominations – in 2000 for Chocolat and in 1999 for The End of the Affair – and received the British Society of Cinematographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. He retired during the 2010s after he was diagnosed with diagnosed with young onset familial Alzheimer’s disease.
