- Born
- Died
- Birth nameNéstor Almendros Cuyás
- One of the highest appraised contemporary cinematographers. He was born in Spain but moved to Cuba by age 18 to join his exiled anti-Franco father. In Havana, he founded a cineclub and wrote film reviews. Then, he went on to study in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale. He directed six shorts in Cuba and two in New York. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, he returned and made several documentaries for the Castro-regime. But after two of his shorts (Gente en la playa (1960) and La Tumba Francesca) had been banned, he moved to Paris. There he became the favourite cameraman of Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut. In 1978, he started his impressive Hollywood-career. In his later years, he co-directed two documentaries about the human rights situation in Cuba: Improper Conduct (1984) (about the persecution of gay people) and Nadie escuchaba (1987). He shot several prestigious commercials for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Nestor Almendros died of cancer.- IMDb mini biography by: Chris Abbenhuis <keller@telebyte.nl>
- ParentsHerminio AlmendrosMaría Cuyas Ponsa
- Cinematographer of many films by François Truffaut (9 features), Éric Rohmer (7 features), Robert Benton (5 features) and Barbet Schroeder (3 features & 2 docs).
- As of 2016, he's the only person to ever win an Oscar in a Terrence Malick movie.
- Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 38th Cannes International Film Festival in 1985.
- Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 46th Venice International Film Festival in 1989.
- [on relying on natural light for The Collector (1967)] The film had to have a 'natural' look, whether we wanted it to or not, because we had only five photoflood lamps. [autobiography, "A Man With A Camera", 1984]
- I found out very soon that Terrence Malick was a man who was very much interested in photography, as well as the story and the actors, but that he also knew a lot about photography, which very few directors do. So he not only let me do what I always wanted to do which is to use less and less electrical light on a period film - but even pushed me in this direction. Rather than reconstructing the light, we would be waiting for the right natural light at the right moment. And it was very exciting to work with a man like that.
- You cannot do good photography or stylish photography if the costume designer or the set designer and the rest don't follow.
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