Terry O’neill
Photographer whose pictures of the stars captured the swaggering spirit of the Swinging Sixties
TERRY O’NEILL, who has died aged 81, was a renowned photographer who made his name capturing the youthful swagger of singers and sinners of Sixties London yet was equally adept at focusing on a lifetime’s experience in his portraits of international statesmen; it was a talent that saw him immortalise Keith Richards’s hangovers and the last days of Winston Churchill.
For O’neill the Sixties were a flashpoint of opportunity and creativity. “I was having the time of my life,” he said. “Every young person had a chance, it didn’t matter, you were all the same, and we all helped each other.”
He was responsible for many of the most famous, and infamous, images of the decade: Brigitte Bardot smoking a cheroot; Raquel Welch on a cross; Rex Harrison at the races; Marianne Faithfull in suspenders; Audrey Hepburn with a white dove on her shoulder; and Frank Sinatra storming over a Miami boardwalk with his heavies. Through O’neill’s lens the decade appeared bold and beautiful.
For the following half-century O’neill joined a small group of photographers born out of that heady cultural period – including David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Annie Leibovitz – who became ancillary features to the international celebrity circuit. For O’neill it was to be a complicated professional relationship: while he married the actress Faye Dunaway, he abhorred Hollywood’s coke-and-dope party lifestyle. “I never wanted attention,” he asserted, “I wouldn’t want to be famous. I’m happy being anonymous.”
It was while on a three-week shoot with Frank Sinatra in the late Sixties that he realised the dangers of becoming the subject. “There was a time when I pulled back,” recalled
O’neill. “He wanted to go drinking, for us to hang out, and I realised if I was sitting there drinking, somebody else would be taking the photographs.”
Terence Patrick O’neill was born to Irish immigrants on July 30 1938 in the suburbs of London where Heathrow Airport now sits. In his youth he trained for the priesthood but harboured a dream of becoming a jazz drummer in America – exhibiting a combination of mindfulness and love of the zeitgeist that would inform much of his photography.
His career began in the unlikely confines of Heathrow, where he worked in an airline’s photographic unit (he had applied to the company hoping that as a steward he would get to America). His big scoop at Heathrow came in 1959 when he photographed a figure sleeping in a waiting lounge – it turned out to be Rab Butler, then the Home Secretary to Harold Macmillan.
The picture drew the attention of editors on the Daily Sketch – then a hugely popular paper – who offered him a place in their stable of in-house photographers. The days and nights of assignments, shoots and Fleet Street darkrooms came naturally. “It was like I was doing something important,” he said. “I used to love that.” His first job was a portrait of Laurence Olivier, and “within two weeks I had photographed the Beatles and the Stones. Nobody ever fazed me after that.
“When the Beatles started to become famous, they switched from living during the day to living at night,” he said. “And I couldn’t do that. I wanted to be in the office at eight in the morning. Drugs I find obnoxious, they’re the worst bloody disease the world’s known.”
He became a workaholic, in the office every day of the week whenever possible. While preparing to photograph Raquel Welch, the American actress complained that she was going to “get crucified” for wearing a bikini in One Million Years BC. “So I went to 20th Century Fox,” recalled O’neill, “and I said if you can build me a crucifix, I got this idea for a picture.”
“I got this idea for a picture” was to be O’neill’s illuminating catchphrase: his eye was informed by a lively imagination. Photographing David Bowie for the singer’s Diamond Dogs album cover he paired him off with monstrous hound, who reared up on to its hind legs with a howl. Bowie didn’t blink. “He didn’t turn a bloody hair,” said O’neill. “Mind you he was zonked out at the time, all the time.”
Perhaps his most famous staged shot was that of Faye Dunaway lounging by the Beverly Hills Hotel pool the morning after her 1977 Oscar win for Network: newspapers litter the tiles, the statuette sits among the teapots and Dunaway sports an expression that asks: “What now?”
“I wanted to capture the look of dazed confusion,” O’neill recalled, “to capture that state of utter shock that Oscar winners enter, where they go to bed thrilled, then overnight, it dawns on them that they’ve changed, that they’ve just become a star. And not just a star, a millionaire.”
O’neill rarely veered into the film world, but in 1981 he was credited (as Terence O’neill) as executive producer on Mommie Dearest, a biopic of Joan Crawford starring Dunaway, and was the stills photographer on the portmanteau feature Aria (1987), which saw 10 directors, from Derek Jarman to Robert Altman, contribute segments shot to arias by Vivaldi, Bach and Wagner.
Always comfortable in the company of film stars, O’neill was the perfect photographer to celebrate Paramount Pictures’ 75th anniversary in 1987 with a portrait of stars from their history. A formal shot with subjects ranging from veterans like James Stewart to young guns such as Tom Cruise, it formed an exhaustive survey of cinema’s backstory in a single frame.
In the late Nineties he photographed a nervous Jake Arnott on the publication of the author’s bestselling Sixties gangland novel, The Long Firm. “Don’t worry, son,” O’neill told him, “it’s only one expression.” One of his strengths was in making his subjects forget that they were having their picture taken, a skill that saw him create a series of late elegiac portraits of Nelson Mandela.
He was awarded a Royal Photographic Society Centenary Medal in 2011 for his “sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography”, and two years later founded the Terry O’neill Awards, an annual competition to help photographers showcase their work to a panel of judges made up of “titans of the industry”. For their inaugural winner, O’neill and his jury chose Laura Boushnak, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian photographer who had produced a series of portraits of Yemeni women pursuing higher education.
He was a jazz fan, and the only photographs on the walls of his Battersea home were those of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Late in life he came to see that the world of celebrity which had given him his platform had deteriorated into a celebration of mediocrity.
“I wouldn’t know how to succeed in today’s world if I was starting again,” he said in 2014. “I don’t know where I’d get the inspiration. Back then film stars were film stars, they had personalities, the secret to their success was hard work, resilience. Now it’s 15 minutes of fame. I don’t want to do people in
X Factor and Get Me Out of Here. I’ve got no interest in it whatsoever. Everyone would do somebody over today sooner than help them. I don’t know what’s happened to the world.”
His one regret was not photographing Marilyn Monroe. When he did have the opportunity he had, rather inconveniently, fallen in love with Monroe’s PR girl. “I’m not going to let you shoot Marilyn,” she told O’neill, “because she always takes the photographers to bed.” O’neill relented: “Of course, I said, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ What a mug.”
O’neill, who was appointed CBE this year, was married three times, first to Vera Day. That was dissolved, and he had a long-term relationship with Faye Dunaway; they married in 1983 and adopted a son. That marriage was also dissolved, and he married, thirdly, Laraine Ashton, who survives him along with his adopted son.
Terry O’neill, born July 30 1938, died November 16 2019