Abstract
“You're with me”: Frank Sinatra and crew on the Miami boardwalk
It was a long and often glamorous road followed by Terry O'Neill from the photographic unit at London's Heathrow Airport to a position among the photographic elite chronicling the celebrity explosion of the last decades of the 20th century. Bailey, Donovan and Duffy were others graphically capturing the images and ethos of the 1960s and beyond to feed the growing appetite of post-war Britons for social history as it happened. But it was O'Neill who also catapulted himself into the higher echelons of Hollywood and rock and roll royalty.
Eventually he married into the former, and although his partnership with Faye Dunaway did not last, his work has. Today, 73 and still in demand to photograph members of the show business elite and world-famous figures from the corridors of power, his iconic images from the past are constantly exhibited around the world. Last year London and Leeds were among the venues for the travelling Terry O'Neill show, and this year his work is already part of The Sunday Times Magazine 50th anniversary exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, while New York and Berlin loom large in his diary.
He has chosen the four pictures in this issue of the BJR. It didn't take him long to select two vintage and two more recent personal favourites from his portfolio, and in recalling photographing the young Bridget Bardot, seen on our cover, he mused on what he considers unfinished business: “I had one frame of the film left in the camera when the wind blew her hair into her face, but I didn't take the picture. Then the wind blew again and the image was even better. My ambition is to get the picture on the tail of an Air France jet.”
With reaching the notoriously elusive Frank Sinatra, he had the help of movie idol Ava Gardner: “I'd photographed her and when I told her I'd got a chance of photographing her ex-husband she wrote a note to him. I never read it but I went to Miami where he was filming and managed to give it to him. He read it and said: ‘Okay, you're with me’, then for the next week totally ignored me, which was great – I could go where I liked and shoot what I liked. Early on I saw him walking on the boardwalk with his people and got the picture. He and Ava were still deeply fond of one another and it proved to me what true love is really about.”
“Nicest man”: Nelson Mandela's morning ritual
“For you, Nelson”: Amy Winehouse
The riveting portrait of the late Amy Winehouse was obtained when she appeared in the London concert to celebrate Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday: “I got off just one shot as she rushed on stage, looked at the camera and mouthed: ‘This one's for you, Nelson’.” O'Neill had been hired as a birthday present for Mandela, compiling an album as he spent weeks following him and also photographing him at London's Dorchester Hotel. “It was extraordinary,” he says, “with all these people coming to see him – Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Bill Clinton – and him talking all day with each of them on every subject you can imagine. He used to read all the newspapers every morning and I love this particular picture. He's the nicest man I ever met and when the job was over I really felt good – you know how you feel when you get something right?”
Working with O'Neill in the 1970s during several journalistic adventures, I latched on to his enthusiasm. I do know that feeling. It's one that will be repeated for him if he succeeds with his latest project – to help another of his subjects and good friend Bobby Moore, England's World Cup-winning captain, be awarded a posthumous knighthood.