Owen Roizman, a renowned cinematographer, was born on September 22, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York.
His father, Sol Roizman, was a cinematographer for Fox Movietone News, and his uncle, Morrie Roizman, was a film editor.
Owen studied math and physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
He began his career shooting TV commercials and made his feature debut as a director of photography with the 1970 movie Stop!.
Owen brought a strong sense of raw, gritty, documentary-style realism to William Friedkin's police action thriller classic The French Connection (1971).
Roizman received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for his outstanding visual contributions to this picture.
He went on to garner four additional Oscar nominations for The Exorcist (1973),Tootsie (1982),Network (1976),and Wyatt Earp (1994).
Owen gave a similar rough and grainy look to the edgy urban thrillers The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) and Straight Time (1978).
His other films encompass an impressively diverse array of different genres, including horror, science fiction, comedy, musicals, drama, and Westerns.
In the early 1980s, Owen took a hiatus from shooting films and formed the commercial production company Roizman and Associates.
He has directed and/or photographed hundreds of TV commercials.
In 1997, he was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers.
His last feature to date was French Kiss (1995).
