Cliff Culley(1928-2016)

Cliff Culley, started at Pinewood special effects department at 1946, under Bill Warrington as head of department. At that time, it was Les Bowie chief of matte painting, and latter on, when Bowie left, Albert Whitlock worked from 1949 to 1953 at Pinewood matte department. Culley became a matte painting specialist and worked on loads of films over the years, and became head of Pinewood's matte painting department in the mid-late 1960s. He provided many optical gags on films too, for example, the reflection of thug in the eye of the beautiful girl from "Goldfinger" Cliff Culley is best known for supervising the matte art on most of the early James Bond films, like, "From Russia with love", "You Only Live Twice" and "On Her Majesty's Secret Service". During the 60's, Culley took Charles Stoneham as matte painter assistant at Pinewood matte department. During these years at Pinewood, he worked at almost every movie filmed on the Studios, with titles like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", "One of Our Dinosaurs is missing" and "Spaceman in King Arthur's Court" for Disney. Since leaving Rank in the mid 70s, Cliff Culley opened his own firm, "Westbury Design and Optical", that provided overspill latent image composition and optical tricks on films such as "Hellraiser II", or "Sword of the valiant" . He got Leigh Took as matte assistant at 1978. His son Neil Culley worked with him since the late 70s as matte camera operator on films like, "Warlords of Atlantis" or "Clash of the Titans". Cliff Culley retired at 1997 after working on the film "Orphans".