Owen Roizman - Biography

Ace cinematographer Owen Roizman was born September 22, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York. His father Sol was a cinematographer for Fox Movietone News and his uncle Morrie Roizman was a film editor. Owen studied math and physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He began his career shooting TV commercials, and made his feature debut as a director of photography with the obscure and little seen 1970 movie Stop (1970). Owen brought a strong and compelling sense of raw, gritty, documentary-style realism to William Friedkin's harsh and hard-hitting police action thriller classic French Connection (1971). Roizman received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for his outstanding visual contributions to this picture; he went on to garner four additional Oscar nominations, for L'exorciste (1973), Tootsie (1982), Network - Main basse sur la TV (1976) and Wyatt Earp (1994). Owen gave a similar rough and grainy look to the edgy urban thrillers Les pirates du métro (1974) and Le récidiviste (1978). His other films encompass an impressively diverse array of different genres which include horror ("The Exorcist"), science fiction (Les femmes de Stepford (1975)), comedy (Le brise coeur (1972) "Tootsie"), musicals (Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)), drama (Sanglantes confessions (1981), Absence de malice (1981)) and even Westerns (La revanche d'un homme nommé Cheval (1976), "Wyatt Earp"). His last feature to date was French Kiss (1995). In the early 1980s Owen took a hiatus from shooting films and formed the commercial production company Roizman and Associates. He has directed and/or photographed hundreds of TV commercials. In 1997 he was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers.