HOW DID HE SNAP THEM ALL?
He pictured the biggest stars for 50 years. As the photgrapher Alan Davidson dies aged 70, the only question is...
THE date: May 1990. The scene: the ice-white beauty of the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, a mythical movie star retreat on the French Riviera. Two of Hollywood’s leading action men, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are there, graciously permitting photographs to be taken.
So far so predictable when a voice from behind one of the clicking lenses pipes up: ‘Why don’t you hold hands and dance? It would make a terrific shot.’
They did and it did — and those photographs went round the world.
The figure behind the voice was Alan Davidson who for half a century — yes, 50 years! — rode shotgun on London’s nightlife, lowlife, political life and celebrity just about everywhere for the Mail.
The world of journalism is mourning his death at the age of 70, a man who was always in the thick of the action behind the camera or in front of it.
No event was off limits to Alan, no gathering where there was a chance that a well-known face might be missed.
He suffered for his craft too, once receiving a bloody nose from a minder at a lunch to remember Buddy Holly. Another time he was pursued by security men while dressed in the flowing robes of an Arab for a costume ball he’d been to.
He photographed everyone, the famous and the plain infamous. His mission: to capture them at play.
He was in Hyde Park, in front of the stage, naturally, when The Rolling Stones played their free concert just days after the death of Brian Jones in 1969.
AND who else but our Alan was at the Royal Albert Hall in 1989 for one of its most starstudded nights, when Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr performed together, one of the last times all three were on the same stage.
One of his most famous pictures — and his favourite — was of the teenage Lady Diana Spencer leaving Princess Margaret’s 50th birthday party at the Ritz in 1980, two months into her romance with Prince Charles.
Shot through a limo window, it is a picture of a luminous and vulnerable beauty.
Equally intimate was the snapshot he took at a private party of Lord Snowdon on his knees talking to could ever do. As Alan himself brilliantly his youngest daughter Lady put it: ‘You could have cut Frances Armstrong-Jones. the atmosphere between the two
The royals regularly featured in with a knife — and it shows.’ his work — he was once sprayed Born in Leeds in 1949, Davidson with white paint by Prince Andrew always wanted to be a Press photographer. (in jest) — but so too did political After leaving school at leaders. The picture he got of 15, he got a job as a messenger at Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath, the old Keystone picture agency in who famously didn’t get on, at a Fleet Street on £4 10s a week. 2002 dinner for the Queen and all He bought a second-hand Rolleiflex living prime ministers, was and a flash gun and went out quite remarkable. and photographed life on the
Its brutal simplicity achieved street. His first published pictures more than 1,000 polished words were of student demonstrations, but he soon discovered a talent for photographing the famous.
In 1969, a picture of actress Rachel Roberts on the day her husband Rex Harrison announced that their marriage was over made the front page of the Daily Sketch and Davidson was on his way.
After a brief stint on the Maidenhead Advertiser he joined the Mail and his photos are a pictorial chronicle of the last 50 years.
He snapped some of the biggest names on the planet: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Michael
Jackson, Jerry Hall and all three of her leading men — Brian Ferry, Mick Jagger and her current husband Rupert Murdoch. Alan’s wife Sandra said she never knew what time he’d get home.
Alan was busy, bossy and sometimes downright irritating, but he rarely fell out with any of his subjects, no matter how often he asked for ‘just one more picture’.
His last and most important assignment was giving away Joanne, youngest of his two daughters, at her wedding last August when he was already very ill.
British Daily Mail Editor Geordie Greig paid tribute to Alan’s skills.
‘His hunger to be in the right place to get the best picture marked him out as someone whose photographs were always going to be remarkable,’ Mr Greig said. ‘He was unstoppable in pursuit and, combined with his irrepressible personality, he was a legend behind the lens.’
Here are some of Alan’s great photographs that show the stars as you rarely see them.