Roger Deakins was born in Torquay in Devon, England. He attended art college at the National Film and Television School and began his career by working in the medium of still photography. Many of his first cinematographic projects were documentaries, often shot in Africa. He also covered the Whitbread Round the World Race, which required him to work for more than nine months as a yacht crew member while filming and directing the documentary. He then moved on to feature film cinematography, starting in England and later in the United States.
Roger Deakins is a 13-time Academy Award® nominee for Best Cinematography, for his work on Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Man Who Wasn't There; No Country for Old Men; and True Grit; Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption; Martin Scorsese's Kundun; Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; Stephen Daldry's The Reader, which he shared with Chris Menges; Sam Mendes' Skyfall; Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners; Angelina Jolie's Unbroken; and, most recently, Denis Villeneuve's Sicario.
Deakins has been nominated for an American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Award for all of the aforementioned films, as well as Mendes' Revolutionary Road, and won three times, for The Shawshank Redemption, The Man Who Wasn't There and Skyfall. He received ASC's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.
Nominated eight times for the BAFTA Award, Deakins has won three for The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men and True Grit. His work has also garnered him four British Society of Cinematographers Awards and three additional nominations, and two Film Independent Spirit Awards, with an additional nomination. In 2007, he received the National Board of Review's Career Achievement Award in Cinematography and, in 2013, Deakins was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the U.K., the only cinematographer to have received this high honor.
Deakins' additional credits include diverse films, such as Mountains of the Moon, Sid & Nancy, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Courage Under Fire, The Big Lebowski, A Beautiful Mind and Doubt. He also served as visual consultant for several animated features, including WALL•E, How to Train Your Dragon, Rango, Rise of the Guardians and The Croods, and served as a consultant on How to Train Your Dragon 2.
Universal Pictures
