Walter Lassally’s crowning professional trophy — the Academy Award he won in 1965 for Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) on Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek (1964) — suffered an oddly final fate decades after the film’s success. Lassally, who had settled in Crete in the 1990s near Stavros (the town where he shot Zorba in 1963), saw that symbol of his achievement physically destroyed when the Oscar melted during a fire at Christiana’s Restaurant on the night of January 1, 2012. The incident turned a piece of Hollywood ephemera into a small local catastrophe: a celebrated international accolade reduced to molten metal in a modest restaurant blaze, an image writers and obituarists later used to poignant effect when recounting the life and later years of the itinerant cameraman.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 2000s
The Zorba Oscar That Melted in a New Year’s Restaurant Fire
Walter Lassally / Zorba the Greek / 2000s
Walter Lassally’s crowning professional trophy — the Academy Award he won in 1965 for Best Cinematography (Black-and-White) on Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek (1964) — suffered an oddly final fate decades after the film’s success. Lassally, who had settled in Crete in the 1990s near Stavros (the town where he shot Zorba in 1963), saw that symbol of his achievement physically destroyed when the Oscar melted during a fire at Christiana’s Restaurant on the night of January 1, 2012. The incident turned a piece of Hollywood ephemera into a small local catastrophe: a celebrated international accolade reduced to molten metal in a modest restaurant blaze, an image writers and obituarists later used to poignant effect when recounting the life and later years of the itinerant cameraman.
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