82 The EconomistNovember 23rd 2019
W
hen brigitte bardotwas on the set of “The Legend of Fren-
chie King”, with a crowd of photographers snapping her, Ter-
ry O’Neill was waiting. Not, like the others, for the moment she
would turn her gorgeous self towards them and strike a stunning
pose with her leather trousers and cigar. Instead he was praying for
the wind to blow her long hair over her face, just once more. When
it did, he had that frame. He called it his picture in a million.
Over a career of 60 years, from hustling cub reportage for the
Daily Sketchto gentle portraits of Nelson Mandela at 90, he always
had an idea for how to get to the character, and usually, with a dose
of luck, it worked. He encouraged Michael Caine to cradle rifles,
framed Mick Jagger in a frosty fur hood, turned Dustin Hofmann
into a pleading panhandler, and shot Elton John in his sequinned
get-up against a huge audience that also sparkled. He let David
Bowie, his crazily unpredictable favourite subject, bring in a Great
Dane for the album-cover shoot of “Diamond Dogs”; the dog reared
up and howled when the strobe went off, while Bowie, zoned out as
usual, stayed still, weird and perfect. He convinced Faye Dunaway
that if she won an Oscar in 1977 she should bring it to the Beverley
Hills Hotel and pose beside the pool in her peach satin robe, with
her Oscar on the breakfast table and newspapers scattered round
her. His idea was to capture the morning after, when stardom had
descended whether she wanted it or not. The shot became an im-
age of jaded celebrity that thousands of people saw.
Stars had been his subject since 1962, when he was sent to pho-tograph a new band at the Abbey Road Studios. The older blokes at
the Sketchscorned that kind of work, but the young were clearly on
the rise, and he was by far the youngest photographer in Fleet
Street at the time. At the studios, to get a better light, he took the
group outside to snap them holding their guitars a bit defensively:
John, Paul, George and Ringo. Next day’s Sketchwas sold out, and
he suddenly found himself with the run of London and all the com-
ing bands, free to be as creative as he liked. A working-class kid
from Romford whose prospects had been either the priesthood or a
job in the Dagenham car plant, like his dad, had the world at his
feet. He wouldn’t have had a prayer, he thought, in any other era.
And obviously it couldn’t last. In a couple of years he would find
a proper job, as both the Beatles and the Stones told him they were
going to. For it was hardly serious work to point your Leica at some-
one and go snap, snap. It was only when he went to Hollywood in
the mid-1960s, to shoot on movie sets, that he realised how defini-
tively things had changed. The vast new market for album covers,
pop magazines, film posters and colour supplements could keep
him in work, and in the money, for life. He began to hang on to his
pictures then, as he went on to do freelance for Vogueand Rolling
Stone and Rave and the Sunday Times, until eventually his archive
had 400m negatives in it. There would have been far more if, by the
2000s, modern celebrities hadn’t ceased to interest him. Amy
Winehouse was the last one he wanted to photograph.
What didn’t change was the nature of the work: catching that
moment, being ready. He had scarcely graduated from a Box
Brownie in 1959, totally self-taught, when he was sent to the Heath-
row viplounge to photograph people arriving and departing. He
snapped a gent in a bowler hat and suit asleep on a bench with Afri-
can chieftains in full regalia round him, and it turned out to be the
home secretary: a famous man suddenly unguarded.
That picture earned him 25 quid. More to the point, it suggested
a good way of approaching the stars. He would look for their hu-
man, vulnerable side, set things up, unobtrusively if he had to (his
presence, like his voice, was always soft), and then start shooting.
As he did, a dove settled by the bare white shoulder of Audrey Hep-
burn. Paul McCartney, playing the piano in a bar, suddenly raised
his eyes to heaven as if amazed by the sound. Steve McQueen let his
features relax as he took a phone call from a friend. Stars lounged
and drowsed: Muhammad Ali with a newspaper, Peter Cook in his
old mac on a lilo in a Hollywood pool. Best of all was to be allowed
to tag along with a star for days, a fly on the wall, until they forgot
that a photographer was there. He got such access with Frank Sina-
tra, who simply told his mafiosi minders, “The kid’s with me,” and
whom he snapped strolling on the boardwalk in Miami Beach, still
with his guard up but with all his swagger plain.
It was easy enough for him to blend in as he worked, for he was
short, good-looking and carefully cheeky. His Romford accent
thrilled grouchy Lee Marvin, and his horse-racing jokes disarmed
the queen into a smile of genuine happiness. Women regularly fell
for his china-blue eyes, and he ended up in bed with many of them,
including Ava Gardner, the most beautiful woman he ever saw, and
Ms Dunaway, to whom he was married for a while. He would prob-
ably have bedded Marilyn Monroe, too, since she slept with all her
photographers, but he never got the chance. Perhaps that was as
well, for when he was with Faye he hated the whole circus. The last
thing he wanted was to become a star himself. He was happy just
eating fish and chips, listening to jazz, and taking pictures.
At heart he was ever the industrious Essex lad, working every
day of the week. He didn’t like holidays. He also loathed digital
photography, which was junk and a joke, and any sort of touch-
ing-up, which made him feel sullied. To the end, he clung to film
cameras and to black-and-white as the best there was. Even so,
there was always something about the finished print that dissatis-
fied him. If he had only stayed longer on that day, at that shoot, if he
had just...he might have got something better. The wind might
have blown a little bit closer to the idea he had in his head. 7Terry O’Neill, photographer of the most famous faces of the
20th century, died on November 16th, aged 81Catching the moment
Obituary Terry O’Neill