Charles Galloway Clarke (1899-1983) ran away from home aged thirteen and, a few years later, stumbled into a job with a film crew. By 1915, he was working for Universal as an assistant cameraman. Clarke began as a director of cinematography in 1920, on a serial called The Son of Tarzan. He went on to shoot around 150 pictures, as well as some television work in the 1960s. He was Oscar-nominated four times, and for a Primetime Emmy once.
Clarke’s pictures included John Ford’s Riley the Cop (1928), Tarzan and his Mate (1934), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Moontide (1942), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Violent Saturday (1955), Bus Stop (1956) and Carousel (1956).
He occasionally provided location-based second unit photography, most notably the China sequences in The Good Earth (1937), and on Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
Although Clarke shot many MGM pictures, he only worked on one of the studio’s musicals, The Cat and the Fiddle.
After retiring on health grounds, Clarke taught film at UCLA and, in 1964, published a book, Professional Cinematography.
