Alec Mills, James Bond cameraman, cinematographer and victim of Roger Moore’s practical jokes – obituary

Alec Mills, who has died aged 91, worked his way up from cinema-mad Cockney tea boy at a small London film studio to cameraman on a string of James Bond films in the George Lazenby and Roger Moore eras, and finally cinematographer on Timothy Dalton’s Licence to Kill and The Living Daylights.

Mills had been friends with Roger Moore since The Saint, which Mills joined as camera operator in 1966. (His first scene found Moore “tied down on a table dressed as a Roman soldier at a fancy dress party”.)

Mills soon became “prime victim” for Moore’s practical jokes, most traumatically waking up to find that Moore had inserted a drunk lorry driver into his bed after a day shooting Octopussy.

On The Spy Who Loved Me, Mills was asked to get a head-on shot of a torpedo being loaded, which involved inching himself backwards into the greased torpedo tube of a working nuclear submarine in Scotland. “Not until Roger is off this sub,” Mills told the director. “I know him and once I’m in there, he’ll fire it for real.”

Mills lost that battle, and as he slithered into the claustrophobic tube, he saw Moore standing over him, grinning, and pointing his finger at the firing button. Mills filmed until the torpedo was inches from his lens, then screamed: “CUT! I can’t swim!”

Other adrenalin spikes in Mills’s eventful career included being lunged by a tranquilised anaconda while filming The Swiss Family Robinson, and chasing an artificial whale across the turbulent Irish Sea for John Huston’s epic Moby Dick. While filming Crossed Swords in Hungary, Oliver Reed corralled him into his liver-ravaging “Club Oliver”. Mills lost consciousness and was dragged back to his hotel, covered in chocolate.

On the Bond films, to capture hand-to-hand fight scenes, Mills would play the part of the villain, with a handheld camera, while 007 beat him up. If the choreography went awry, he got a black eye. On The Living Daylights, he was nearly mown down by a Morrocan Air Force C130 Hercules, and felt certain he had been haunted by a busload of recently deceased nuns while filming a car stunt on a bend of a precipitous Mexican road.

He also worked on Antonioni’s Blow-Up (“Could this be art for art’s sake gone mad?” he wondered) and Macbeth by Roman Polanski, who chose Mills as his camera operator because they were exactly the same height, and Mills would thus see everything from Polanski’s viewpoint.

Despite having to stand on a box to reach his viewfinder, wrote Roger Moore in the preface to Mills’s memoir, “in terms of talent and personality, Alec is a big man.”

Alec Mills was born in Kilburn on May 10 1932 to Alf, a Somme veteran and porter, and Lil (née Hodgson), a Savile Row tailor’s assistant. Alec had no bedroom, but slept on the sofa; an older brother, suffering from infantile paralysis, died at 16. His weekly treat was a bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.

He stayed in London during the Blitz, devouring free screenings of Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy in the church hall. The pennies he earnt in the church choir he would spend on cinema tickets, or sneak in.

He left school at 14 for Carlton Hill Studios in Maida Vale, which made musical interludes or the second feature. He weaponised his small height (“that sweet little boy”, the crew called him) and tried to iron out his Cockney accent.

After National Service in the Fleet Air Arm, he moved to Riverside Studios as a clapper boy, and became a protege of the cinematographer Harry Waxman, cutting his teeth on the film noir The Sleeping Tiger, starring Dirk Bogarde, directed by Joe Losey (The Servant and The Go-Between).

His many cameraman credits included Death on the Nile, under Powell and Pressburger’s great cinematographer Jack Cardiff; Gulliver’s Travels; and Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

He was elevated to Bond cinematographer after impressing producer Cubby Broccoli with his photography on Shaka Zulu, the 1986 television series with Edward Fox.

In 1978, he became the first chairman of the Guild of British Camera Technicians.

His first marriage to (Elizabeth) Lesley Tildesley ended in divorce, and in 1977 he married Zsuzsanna “Suzy” Szemes, Hungarian assistant director on Crossed Swords. She survives him, with a son and daughter from his first marriage.

Alec Mills, born May 10 1932, died February 12 2024