- Lassaly retired to the village of Stavros in the 1990s, near the beach that served as the backdrop for the final scene of Zorba the Greek. He donated his Academy Award to Christiana's Restaurant, a beach front taverna near the exact spot where the famous dancing scene with Quinn and Bates took space. The statuette was on display on the bar until a fire destroyed it in 2012.
- Moved to London as a boy, a refugee from Nazi Germany.
- Member of the British Society of Cinematographers (BSC).
- His long and productive association with Merchant-Ivory Films got him the job of director of photography on The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1991), which Ismail Merchant and James Ivory produced and which Simon Callow directed. However, his relationship with Callow, who had never directed a film before, was almost entirely adversarial.
- His father made industrial and documentary films, working in Britain from 1939.
- First worked as a photographer and began his screen career on feature films as a clapper boy at Riverside Studios.
- His family was Protestant by religion and Jewish by ancestry.
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