Roger Deakins

Roger Deakins married script supervisor Isabella James Purefoy Ellis on 11 December 1991.

His chief hobbies are photography, fishing and travelling.

Roger Deakins was born on 24 May 1949, in Torquay, Devon, England. He is the son of William Albert Deakins, a builder, and Josephine (née Messum), an actress.

He was a student of Torquay Boys' Grammar School and was very engrossed in painting right from his childhood.

True to his passion, he took up graphic designing at the Bath School of Art and Design in the city of Bath. It was while pursuing this course that he learnt about his interest in photography.

As he explored his new found love of photography, he discovered that he was quite gifted in the art. Eventually, he got hired to produce a photographic documentary of his home town, Torquay.

After about a year, he moved to the National Film and Television School in Buckinghamshire.

After graduating from the National Film and Television School, Roger Deakins was hired as a cameraman. For the next seven years, he filmed different documentaries in various foreign locations.

In one of his earliest projects, he was a contestant on a round-the-world yacht race called ‘Around the World with Ridgeway’. The project consisted of filming the daily tensions among the crewmen while undertaking a nine-month journey at sea. His work in the project was much appreciated.

After the success of ‘Around the World with Ridgeway’, he began filming different documentaries in Africa like ‘Zimbabwe’ and ‘Eritrea – Behind Enemy Lines’ which highlighted the conflict situation and social unrest prevalent at that time.

Till the early 1980s, he made several documentaries and also dabbled in music videos. He was the director and cinematographer of the concert film ‘Van Morrison in Ireland’ (1981), and music videos like Carl Perkins’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.

Afterwards, he also worked on ‘Towers of Babel’, British biopic ‘Sid and Nancy’ (1986), and British drama films ‘The Kitchen Toto’ (1988) and ‘Pascali's Island’ (1988).

Deakins is accredited with outstanding cinematography in a number of films. Some of his most notable work can be seen in ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’, ‘No Country for Old Men’ ‘The Reader’, ‘Revolutionary Road’, and more recently ‘Skyfall’.