Actor / Director Profile

Ace cinematographer Owen Roizman was born on September 22, 1936 in Brooklyn, New York. His father Sol was a cinematographer for Fox Movietone News and his uncle Morris was a film editor. Owen studied math and physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He began his career shooting TV commercials. Roizman made his feature debut as a director of photography with the obscure and little seen 1970 movie "Stop." 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 "The French Connection." 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 "The Exorcist," "Tootsie," "Network," and "Wyatt Earp." Owen gave a similar rough and grainy look to the edgy urban thrillers "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" and "Straight Time." Roizman's other movies encompass an impressively diverse array of different film genres which include horror ("The Exorcist"), science fiction ("The Stepford Wives"), comedy ("The Heartbreak Kid," "Tootsie"), musicals ("Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"), drama ("True Confessions," "Absence of Malice"), and even Westerns ("The Return of a Man Called Horse," "Wyatt Earp"). His last feature to date was "French Kiss." In the early 80s 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 Owen Roizman was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers.