25 Movie Talents We Lost In 2016

25. Vilmos Zsigmond

Kicking off the saddest year in recent memory, celebrated Hungarian-American cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond died on New Year’s Day last year.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential cinematographers in film history, Zsigmond first rose to prominence in the early 1970s while working on Robert Altman’s revisionist western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, backwoods thriller Deliverance and again with Altman on the psychological thriller Images, which helped scoop him a BAFTA nomination for Best Cinematography.

He won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi Close Encounters of the Third Kind and eventually won a BAFTA for his work on Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter.

Zsigmond’s other notable films include comedy The Witches of Eastwick and neo-noir crime thriller The Black Dahlia and in 2014 he was recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award at Cannes Film Festival.