My father, Clive Winter, who has died aged 84, was a multiple Bafta award-winning sound mixer and engineer whose work included Chariots of Fire (1981), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and The Godfather Part III (1990).
For more than three decades he worked in Britain and all over the world on many significant films. He collected Baftas for Best Sound for his work on Alan Parker’s musical Bugsy Malone (1976), for Pink Floyd The Wall (1982) and for The Killing Fields (1984). He also received four further Bafta nominations for Chariots of Fire, The Mission (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam and The Commitments (1991).
Clive was born and brought up in Redhill, Surrey, the son of Ron, a painter and decorator, and Irene. He left Cromwell Road school at 14 to become an apprentice woodcutter, and after doing national service in the RAF – he was a radar fitter in Germany – he took his newly learned skills in electronics to the BBC, where he helped to cover sporting events. His first credit came on the sports documentary Goal! The World Cup, which chronicled England football team’s victory in 1966.
After a stint at Granada Television working on ITV shows, where he met his future wife, Jean Weston, a script supervisor whom he married in 1964, he became a freelancer, building up a portfolio of work on television films and shorts. Parker used Clive on many of his projects, and in 1990, at the request of Francis Ford Coppola, he worked on the Oscar-nominated Godfather Part III. Coppola grew close to Clive during the shoot, even asking him to appear on camera as a bishop – a role he politely turned down, admitting he preferred life behind the cameras. He also worked with John Sayles, David Mamet, Bruce Robinson and Taylor Hackford.
Despite his success in Britain, Clive’s film sound work was never acknowledged by the Academy Awards, even though many of the films he worked on collected major honours.
He retired at the age of 72, after which he enjoyed playing golf and boules with his friends, followed Tottenham Hotspur and took pleasure in his duties as a grandfather.
He is survived by Jean, by me and my sister, Jane, and by his grandchildren, Harry, Jessica, Isabelle and Eve.
