World cinema has lost one of its most gifted and unassuming talents with the untimely passing of Mike Roberts, the camera operator who worked regularly with Alan Parker, Neil Jordan, Roland Joffe, Richard Attenborough and Steven Spielberg.
"Roberts was one of the finest camera operators in the world, and probably the greatest British film cameraman ever," Alan Parker noted in an obituary for the Guardian. "As a director, I made eight films with Mike as my camera operator, and the thought of working without him, frankly, fills me with dread. Like many directors, I will miss him terribly. He was our eyes; his understanding and `knowingness' of a scene was consummate. Although he had no formal arts training, his perception of composition and light was instinctive and intuitive, as was his mastery of how subtle and artful camera movement could add power and energy to a shot."
Born in Woking, Surrey, Mike Roberts started out in film as a central camera loader, working his way up from clapper loader to focus puller. While working on Fred Zinnemann's A Man For All Seasons in 1965, he filled in one day when the camera operator was ill and went on to work in that capacity on 65 productions.
He was renowned for his unstinting reliability and professionalism, and for his consistently good-humoured approach which greatly endeared him to all who worked with him. I had the great pleasure of meeting him on several film sets in Ireland, and I will never forget watching him at work on Parker's film of Evita in Budapest. Entirely undaunted by the sheer scale of the film's elaborate sequence of Eva Peron's funeral, he chatted amiably as 5,000 extras took their positions and then just as casually strapped himself into a crane on which he was hoisted high in the sky to shoot the movie's epic overhead shots.
Neil Jordan recalls "a lined, gypsy face, a pair of steady blue eyes and a thin, sinewy hand that guided his camera effortlessly to that magical place where the scene, the setting and the actor's face begin to make sense." Parker notes his "extraordinary rapport with actors - being, as he so often was, the closest person to them on a film set" and how "his gentle manner and unselfish technique put great actors at ease, allowing them the freedom to be at their best."
IN one of those rare and welcome moments when such an accomplished behind-the-scenes craftsman is publicly acknowledged, the British Academy in 1997 awarded Mike Roberts the Michael Balcon Award for outstanding contribution to British cinema. He was the first technician to be so honoured.
On May 24th he died at the age of 60, peacefully in his sleep while in Bath to work on the Lasse Hallstrom film, Chocolat.
