The man who shot – and loved – the great stars
The big, bold East End laugh: that was the first thing I remembered when I read about Terry O’neill’s death on Saturday night, after a long battle with prostate cancer. It was the kind of laugh that reaches right up into a person’s hairline and bares every filling. The kind of laugh that told me, when I interviewed the iconic
He’d always rightly felt as big a star as the A-listers he photographed, even when kneeling at their feet
photographer: “I’ve slept with every woman I’ve wanted to and photographed everyone worth photographing – and you know what? I can believe my own good luck.” Because by the time I met O’neill, back in April 2012, every personal and professional aspiration had already been met.
Didn’t he want to photograph the Duchess of Cambridge, I asked? “Nah, I don’t think so,” he’d flung back, slumped in an armchair above the Dover Street Art Gallery showing an exhibition of his raw, reportage-style photographs: The Beatles rehearsing, Sinatra walking the Miami boardwalk with his Mafioso-mugged minders,
Bardot sucking on a fat cigar and Raquel Welch strung up on a cross.
“I don’t fancy her,” he’d shrugged with another one of those laughs. “As long as you fancy them, it’s fine. If you don’t, forget about it.”
Of course, most of the other greats would just pretend to fancy their subjects. But a couple of hours with the Michael Caine of photography confirmed that he couldn’t be bothered with that. Just as he wasn’t going to be bothered with smarming up to the likes of Kate Moss, who “just scraped in under the wire”, he told me. “I never rated her. Kate only endured because she was associated with those supermodels.” Certainly none of the new crop compared with women such as Jean Shrimpton (“the best of all the English models”) or Faye Dunaway – both of whom he fancied so much he either dated or married them.
There was one that got away though: Princess Diana. The Princess of Wales would drop by his South Audley Street house for a cup of tea whenever she was shopping at nearby Thomas Goode.
O’neill told me: “She was such a nice woman. I suppose I kept thinking that it would come about quite naturally when she was older and more sophisticated.”
He knew how he’d shoot her, too: “They would’ve been much racier than the other ones she did. Diana needed loosening up and I could have done it – it would have been so easy for me.”
O’neill didn’t lack self-confidence, you see – always rightly feeling as big a star as the A-listers he photographed, even when kneeling at their feet. But that was only part of his genius.