Sergey Pavlovich Urusevsky was born on 10 (23) December 1908 in Petersburg.
In 1935 he graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Fine Arts (V.A. Favorsky's workshop) and started his filming career.
From 1937 he worked as a cameraman in the Soyuzdetfilm Studio. Urusevsky served as a frontline cameraman during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. In 1957 while shooting The Cranes Are Flying he devised and for the first time applied circular camera rails.
S.P.Urusevsky died on November 12, 1974 and was laid to rest at the Vvedensky Cemetery in Moscow.
Urusevsky’s most considerable post-war work was The Village Teacher (1947) directed by Mark Donskoy. From 1950 he worked at the Mosfilm Studio and shot color films directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin (The Return of Vasili Bortnikov (1953)), Yuli Raizman (Dream of a Cossack (1951) and The Lesson of Life (1955)) and Grigori Chukhrai’s (The Forty-First (1956)).
Urusevsky’s biggest works were created in collaboration with the film director Mikhail Kalatozov: The First Echelon (1956), The Unsent Letter (1960), I Am Cuba (1964). The best of them was The Cranes Are Flying (1957) which excelled in innovative camerawork solutions and won the Grand Prize at the 11th Cannes International Film Festival. In the 1960s Urusevsky directed and shot the feature film Run of an Ambler (1969) based on Chinghiz Aitmatov’s story Farewell, Gyulsara and Sing Your Song, Poet (1972).