Biography
Thomas Del Ruth was born into a film family, as his mother was musical star Winnie Lightner and his father was director Roy Del Ruth. After serving as a paratrooper in the US Army, Del Ruth worked as a print model and an actor in commercials before he began studying cinematography at the USC film school, while also working as a messenger at Disney. He was hired by 20th Century-Fox and refined his craft from the mid-1960s as an assistant or operator for such esteemed directors of photography as Conrad Hall, Bruce Surtees and Jordan Cronenweth. He started out as a cinematographer in television, and made his feature bow with the comedy horror "Motel Hell" in 1980. With the exception of "Death Wish II," the majority of his early pictures were undistinguished. But he hit a rich vein of form in the middle of the decade with the teen movies "The Breakfast Club" and "Stand By Me," the Arnold Schwarzenegger actioner "The Running Man" and the baby comedies "Look Who's Talking" and "Look Who's Talking Too." Del Ruth still continued shooting TV movies like the corporate comedy "Barbarians at the Gate" and, thus, was a natural choice to shoot the pilots of "The X Files," "ER" and "The West Wing." Among a host of career accolades, he won two Emmys for his pioneering moving camera techniques on the latter show and brought a similar visual energy to "JAG," "Charmed" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." He returned to features in 2010 with the comedy "Flipped."
