George Folsey
American cinematographer (1898-1988)
George Joseph Folsey, A.S.C., was an American cinematographer who worked on 162 films from 1914 to his retirement in 1976. He was one of the main cinematographers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for 27 years and was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and was a pioneer in many cinematography techniques. He was the recipient of the first Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the American Society of Cinematographers in 1988, for whom he had served as president in 1956–1957. Film critic Todd McCarthy called him one of Hollywood's most distinguished cinematographers for 50 years.
Biography
Born in 1898 in Brooklyn, New York, Folsey began his film career at the age of 14, when he was hired by Jesse Lasky to work as an office boy in his newly formed Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company in New York City.
At the age of 16, he started work as an assistant cameraman and learnt from H. Lyman Broening. He worked as assistant cameraman for directors Edwin S. Porter and J. Searle Dawley. He was promoted to second cameraman and by the age of 19 he had become a cinematographer.
Folsey earned his first screen credit for His Bridal Night in 1919 working for director Kenneth Webb with whom he also made The Fear Market, Sinners and The Stolen Kiss (all 1920). During the 1920s, he worked for Associated First National and Biograph Studios, working multiple times with directors Edward Dillon, Chester M. Franklin, Roy William Neill, George Archainbaud and John Francis Dillon.
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This entry incorporates text from “George Folsey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.