William H. Daniels

President of American Society of Cinematographers 1961-1963.

He won his Oscar in 1949 for his brilliant B+W cinematography on the classic film noir The Naked City (1948). Daniels received two other Oscar nominations.

In his biography of producer Mark Hellinger (who produced The Naked City (1948), which won Daniels an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White), Jim Bishop wrote: "In the old silent days, Daniels had been the best of them all. His camera work was so close to art that producers and directors and cameramen used to sit in private projection rooms, not to judge a picture, but to see what new tricks of lighting and effects Daniels had achieved. The industry acknowledged that Daniels' work was so fine that other cameramen were never censured for shamelessly stealing it".

"Though he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for the 1930 English-language version of Anna Christie (1930) (he also shot the 1931 German-language version Anna Christie (1930)), ironically, it was his only nomination for a Garbo film.

Oscar-winning director of photography William Daniels was a master of black-and-white cinematographer most famous for the 21 films he shot that starred the immortal Greta Garbo between 1926 and 1939.

Among the Gabro classics he lensed were The Torrent (1924), Flesh and the Devil (1926), Love (1927) (Garbo and home studio MGM's first crack at Lev Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"), Mata Hari (1931), Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), the sound remake of Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1936), and Ninotchka (1939). He won fame for his lensing of Garbo, but to those who claimed that he was essential to his success, Daniels replied, "I didn't create a 'Garbo face. ' I just did portraits of her I would have done for any star. My lighting of her was determined by the requirements of a scene. I didn't, as some say I did, keep one side of her face light and the other dark. But I did always try to make the camera peer into the eyes, to see what was there.