Biography
Christopher Challis (1919–2012) was an English cinematographer who worked on more than 70 feature films from the 1940s to the 1980s. He began his career as a camera assistant on newsreels and at the Technicolor laboratory, served in the RAF Film Unit during the Second World War, and later became a camera operator before graduating to director of photography.
Challis was closely associated with the Powell and Pressburger partnership, shooting or operating on many of their films including The Small Back Room (1949), The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Ill Met by Moonlight (1957). He also collaborated frequently with Stanley Donen on six films, winning a BAFTA Award for Arabesque (1966). Other notable credits include Genevieve (1953), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), The Deep (1977) and Evil Under the Sun (1982). He served as president of the British Society of Cinematographers from 1962 to 1964 and published his memoirs in 1995.
