The Guardian (09/Jan/2008) - Obituary: Peter Handford

(c) The Guardian (09/Jan/2008)

Obituary: Peter Handford

Pioneering location sound recordist, he worked with Lean, Hitchcock and Losey

Peter Handford, a pioneer of location sound recording, who has died aged 88, was a man with two great loves: cinema and steam locomotives. Both captured his imagination as a young boy as he wandered the Kent countryside following the early death of his father from tuberculosis. In an interview shortly before his death, he complained that he had always hated living in cities because the sound of the city was always too jumbled. In the open air of the countryside he could make sense of the collage of sound. He also discovered a busy railway line running close to his home. He said: "I've always loved trains - I love the sound of steam locomotives because ... you can get a sense of the weight and power of these mighty machines from the sound they make when they are puffing up an incline."

In later years he made many track-side recordings of steam locomotives which he released on his own Transacord record label and are now highly sought-after collector's items. His vast catalogue of steam recordings are now lodged at the National Railway Museum in York.

Peter stumbled across the joy of steam railways as a nine-year-old and discovered cinema at a similar age, thanks to an indulgent grandfather. Peter said: "I was fascinated by cinema from the word go. I loved going to the big picture houses in Canterbury, so much so that I started a film club at school." At the age of 17, he was taken on as an apprentice sound technician at the newly built Denham Studios.

During the second world war he volunteered to be part of the British Expeditionary Force and had to be evacuated when the Germans overran France. He returned as a cameraman on the D-day landings. He was shot during the hedgerow fighting two days later. His life was saved by a diary and a silver cigarette case which stopped the bullet.

During a career which stretched from 1936 to 1988, he worked with a host of top directors including Alfred Hitchcock, Sydney Pollack, Tony Richardson, Joseph Losey and David Lean. He struck up friendships with Katharine Hepburn, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and was the proud recipient of an Oscar and a Bafta award for his work on Out of Africa in 1985.

Although he worked closely with Hollywood during his later years, he will be forever linked with the English new wave cinema movement of the 1960s. This back-to-basics form of film-making was led by Tony Richardson and included other leading directors such as Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger and Jack Clayton. Peter helped create such classics as The Entertainer and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1960, and Billy Liar and Tom Jones in 1963. Later he formed a close working relationship with the blacklisted American director Losey, creating the sound for The Go-Between (1970), starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, A Doll's House (1973), with Jane Fonda, as well as The Romantic English woman (1975) and Steaming (1985), the final film of Diana Dors.

At a time when 95% of exterior shots were being mocked up inside a studio, Peter pioneered the development of location sound recording in 1955 on Lean's Venice romance, Summer Madness, starring Hepburn - techniques he perfected for Room at the Top in 1959.

His skills for capturing complex location sound meant that he was always busy and went on to do the sound for such other modern classics as Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Dangerous Liaisons and Gorillas in the Mist (1988) and Clint Eastwood's homage to The African Queen, White Hunter Black Heart (1990). As any good soundman would, Peter took pride in a clear, well-mixed soundtrack. Although technology has improved, he said that the Americanisation of movies had meant that many feature films were swamped with unnecessary music. He advocated that wherever possible it was always better to let natural ambience speak for itself. "Sound recording is so good now that you don't need lots of music."

His first major film came in 1949 when he was offered the job working for Hitchcock on his experimental film Under Capricorn. "Working for Hitch was fairly boring," Peter said. "It was a great honour because he was a master film-maker but he wasn't interested in having a discussion. He came in every day totally prepared. He knew exactly what he wanted and how he was going to achieve it. Everything was mapped out and you did as you were told, and if you didn't you were off the film."

It was while he was working on Billy Liar in 1963 for Schlesinger that he met his future wife, actor Helen Fraser, who was playing Billy's long-suffering girlfriend, Barbara. The loan of a coat during a cold morning's location shoot in a cemetery sparked a relationship which lasted until his death.

Peter retired after finishing work on Havana with Robert Redford in 1988. He kept himself busy archiving his sound recordings, working in his garden and enjoyed the continued success of his wife as the infamous Sylvia in ITV's Bad Girls.

She survives him together with two daughters, Marilyn and Pamela, from a previous marriage.