Obituary | Catching the moment

Obituary: Terry O’Neill died on November 16th

The photographer of the most famous faces of the late 20th century was 81

WHEN BRIGITTE BARDOT was on the set of “The Legend of Frenchie King”, with a crowd of photographers snapping her, Terry 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.

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Over a career of 60 years, from hustling cub reportage for the Daily Sketch to 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 image of jaded celebrity that thousands of people saw.

Stars had been his subject since 1962, when he was sent to photograph a new band at the Abbey Road Studios. The older blokes at the Sketch scorned 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 Sketch was sold out, and he suddenly found himself with the run of London and all the coming 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 someone 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 definitively 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 Vogue and 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 Heathrow VIP lounge to photograph people arriving and departing. He snapped a gent in a bowler hat and suit asleep on a bench with African 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 human, 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 Hepburn. 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 Sinatra, 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 probably 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 touching-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 dissatisfied 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.

Picture credit:Terry O'Neill/Iconic Images

This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Catching the moment"

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