1. Sven Nykvist won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander.
15 Facts About Sven Nykvist
1. 2.
Sven Nykvist's parents were Lutheran missionaries who spent most of their lives in the Belgian Congo, so Nykvist was raised by relatives in Sweden and saw his parents rarely.
3.
Sven Nykvist moved to Italy in 1943 to work at Cinecitta Studios, returning to Sweden two years later.
4.
Sven Nykvist worked on many small Swedish films for the next few years, and spent some time with his parents in Africa filming wildlife, footage which was later released as a documentary entitled In the Footsteps of the Witch Doctor.
5.
Sven Nykvist was one of three cinematographers to work on the film, the others being Gunnar Fischer and Hilding Bladh.
6.
Sven Nykvist worked as sole cameraman on Bergman's Oscar-winning films The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly.
7.
Sven Nykvist revolutionised the way faces are shot in close-up with Bergman's psychologic drama Persona.
8.
Sven Nykvist won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for two of his films: Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander, both of which were Bergman films.
9.
Sven Nykvist said that his favorite cinematography was Fanny and Alexander.
10.
Sven Nykvist was nominated for a Cinematography Oscar for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and in the category of Best Foreign Language Film for The Ox, in which he directed Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann.
11.
Sven Nykvist won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his work on The Sacrifice, the last film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, who by then was in exile from his native Russia.
12.
Sven Nykvist was the first European cinematographer to join the American Society of Cinematographers, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASC in 1996.
13.
Sven Nykvist's career was brought to an abrupt end in 1998 when he was diagnosed with aphasia; he died in 2006, aged 83.
14.
Sven Nykvist wrote three books, including Curtain Call published in 1999.
15.
In 2003, Sven Nykvist was judged one of history's ten most influential cinematographers in a survey conducted by the International Cinematographers Guild.