Awards Features

In fact, he didn't much set out to make his mark at anything.

"I wasted a lot of time. I didn't do much at all," says the 83-year-old Blighty native. "I just messed about and ran a little optical shop.

"When I came to America in 1953, I didn't know anything about what I was going to do. I was invited by a friend of the family to go to Chicago and work for him. But I didn't like the work and didn't stay, and went off to California."

By his own description, he was lucky in landing his first job in optics: "I happened onto a gentleman who took a liking to me because I had highly polished shoes." Decades of work with high-tech Cold War contractors followed.

Along the way, vfx legend Richard Edlund enlisted him to design the lenses for a new optical printer system. Grafton's work in the mid-1970s was revolutionary, explains Jon Alexander, a longtime optical camera operator for Industrial Light & Magic.

"Without those lenses, none of our composites would look correct," Alexander says. "There was a level of quality that wasn't something you could buy off the shelf.

"The beauty of his lenses was they were incredibly flat, so as we went through our different generations, the different shots had to line up perfectly. The lenses allowed us to have the reality that everybody takes for granted now."

All of ILM's groundbreaking work from "Star Wars" through the early 1990s depended on Grafton's lenses, says Alexander. "Our work in those glory days would not have been possible without that quality of lens."

Grafton isn't particularly a movie buff, though he says he did enjoy taking his family to the premiere of "The Empire Strikes Back."

His mantel is already crowded with kudos, including two Scientific and Engineering Awards from the Acad for his work, one from 1980 and from 1986. That's where his Oscar statuette is headed, too.

"I'll make room for it," he says.