John Alcott won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
Alcott photographed Barry Lyndon, Kubrick’s 1975 period film about the rise and decline of an eighteenth-century Irish adventurer. The movie is famous for its carefully composed interiors, extensive use of natural light, and candlelit scenes.
For some interior sequences, Kubrick and Alcott used specially modified lenses originally developed for NASA. Their unusually wide apertures allowed the camera to record scenes lit largely by candlelight, creating a soft, historically distinctive appearance.
Alcott’s Oscar was one of Barry Lyndon’s four Academy Awards. The movie also won awards for art direction, costume design, and musical score adaptation. Geoffrey Unsworth, who is sometimes mistakenly named in this connection, was the cinematographer of several other major British films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey’s early visual work before Alcott took over.