Terry's Gold

From Sinatra, Lennon and JFK to Jagger, Bono and Winehouse – legendary photographer Terry O’Neill has a star-studded CV that probably features more heavyweight celebrity names than the entirety of Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama.

“I’ve photographed everybody,” the 74-year-old declares, speaking in a strong Cockney accent. “About the only person I haven’t photographed is Jack Nicholson. I’ve done everyone else.”
The amiably twinkle-eyed O’Neill – whose father was from Cork – isn’t exaggerating. He estimates that he’s photographed somewhere in the region of 5,000 celebrities over his six decades in the business. Beginning his career as a London press photographer in the early ‘60s, snapping now iconic images of such fledgling stars as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithful, he eventually moved to Hollywood, where he rubbed shoulders with Ava Gardner, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. He was once married to actress Faye Dunaway.
Although now semi-retired, and claiming there’s nobody left that he wants to shoot, he’ll still force himself out of bed for a cool ten grand: “But that’s just for saying hello!”
Why has he never photographed Jack Nicholson?
“Because [David] Bailey always photographs him,” he laughs. “So I leave that to Bailey.”
We’re meeting upstairs in the Shelbourne Hotel on a wet Saturday afternoon in January. O’Neill has just flown into Dublin in advance of an appearance on tonight’s Brendan O’Connor Show to promote his forthcoming retrospective exhibition in Cork, curated by Irish Examiner Arts Editor Marc O’Sullivan and arts writer Tina Darb O’Sullivan, in Wandesford Quay Gallery and Cork City Hall.
“We travel with this exhibition all over the world,” he explains. “I’m so pleased because I’ve always wanted to go back to Cork. I haven’t been there in 50 years so I can’t wait.”
Despite being born and raised in London, he still considers himself fully Irish. “I was conceived over here and then my parents moved to England. I was born there and I’ve got a Cockney accent. Everybody thinks I’m a Cockney, but I’m not. I’m Irish in myself. I used to go to Cork for my summer holidays. I loved it there and I’m frightened if I go back, I’ll never want to leave.”
Of course, the best thing about a retrospective of signed photographic prints is that you can show the very same exhibition simultaneously all over the world. Which is exactly what he does.
“I’ve got a show in France just opened on Tuesday, we have the one in Cork, we’re going to Turkey, Madrid, Istanbul, New York, LA. We’re getting into every country that we can because the more countries you’re in, the more you sell. It just adds up.”
A traditionalist, he despises digital cameras and still always shoots with film. “I think film will be like vinyl albums. They all went out of fashion, but now they’re bringing them all out again.”
Music was his first love. O’Neill originally planned to be a jazz drummer, but caught the photographic bug while working at Heathrow Airport. Given a cheap camera and sent out to photograph airport scenes for British Airways, he struck gold almost immediately.
“They had me out photographing little kids, and people saying goodbye and crying, and all that,” he recalls. “I saw this guy in a pinstripe suit sitting amongst a load of African chieftains. He’d fallen asleep, and it made a really good picture. So I took it and a reporter came up and said, ‘I’m from the Sunday Dispatch and I’ve told my picture editor about this picture I saw you take, and he wants to see it’.”
It turned out that the sleeping man in pinstripes was none other than Rab Butler, the then Foreign Secretary. A natural charmer, born with the gift of the gab, O’Neill soon talked himself into a fulltime newspaper gig.
“I was 20 then, and I’d say the next youngest photographer was 31 – so I was a kid,” he says. “I didn’t realise why they gave me this job, but they saw pop was coming. And one of the editors used to produce a thing called Cool For Cats and he wanted me to photograph all these pop groups. Because what you must realise then is that there were no groups. They were all famous singers like Frankie Lane, Guy Mitchel, Joe Stafford. Anyways, so I go down to do this group, and they’d just made a record called ‘Please Please Me’. So I took this picture of them: it’s so naïve, but it’s the first picture of a pop group ever. And they published it, the papers sold out, and then I was off and running.”
Having done The Beatles, his next set of rock ‘n’ roll subjects was obvious. “They said, ‘You know music, so who’s the next big group?’ And The Rolling Stones were more my speed. So I went down to photograph them. I took the pictures in and they were horrified, said they thought they looked like five primeval monsters! So then I had to find another group. And there was a group called The Dave Clarke Five, and I photographed them, and they put the two together as ‘Beauty and the Beast’. So that was the start of my career. I’ve never looked back. I started at the top. And it just kept going. I’ve been very lucky.”
It being the ‘60s, he was soon swinging around London with the likes of Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris and other celebs. As his photography career took off, his marriage collapsed. It’s something he still regrets.
“My first wife was great,” he sighs. “In the ‘60s if you weren’t married by the time you were 20 or 21 people thought you were gay, or there was something wrong with you, so you sort of rushed into marriage. I didn’t know a thing – about anything! And I really regretted the marriage breaking up, but those things happen – and we are still good friends.”
He married Faye Dunaway in 1983: his iconic portrait of the star reclining on a deckchair by an LA swimming-pool, with her Oscar on a table and newspapers strewn on the ground, is featured in the Cork exhibition. They were together for four years.
“I always said I’d never marry a movie star, and I ended up marrying one,” he says. “Anyway, that was a mistake. That took me 10 years to get out of. Now I’m married to a lovely girl, I’m really happy, and this will definitely be my last marriage.”
Having started off as a press photographer in the ‘60s, what’s his take on the modern paparazzi?
“Oh, they’re a load of monkeys,” he sneers. “I don’t know why they don’t ban them. I don’t see any reason for their existence at all, and they’ve ruined everything for people now. A movie star would smack you in the face as soon as talk to you nowadays. You know, it’s a joke. There is no respect. All the people that I worked with, they had this respect. I mean it was different.”
What’s the most important quality a photographer needs?
“Anonymity,” he says. “to make himself like he’s not there, that’s the greatest lesson I could tell anybody. I learned that, funnily enough, from Sinatra. I knew Ava Gardner and she wrote a letter of introduction to me. I went to Miami and gave him the letter. He read the letter, smiled at me, and said, ‘Right, you’re with me’. Then he totally ignored me for three weeks! After I finished, I realised what a gift he gave me because he let me go anywhere, I could do anything I liked, and just pretended I wasn’t there. And I realised: that’s the secret of a great photographer – to make yourself anonymous. It’s incredible.”
O’Neill has published a number of coffee-table tomes in recent years, one of which was dedicated to his Sinatra images (2009’s Sinatra: Frank & Friendly). He still considers photographing Ol’ Blue Eyes to be one of his standouts moments.
“Sinatra was an incredible professional and to work for him you had to be the best. Everyone who worked for him – all the musicians – were the best people going, so you knew if you were with him, you were in town. He was an incredible guy and he was great with women. I learned a lot from him, in more senses than one.”
Another of his books is 2008’s Eltonography, a collection of portraits of Elton John. “I sort of discovered him really,” he recalls. “After I left the papers and went freelance I got a reputation for always finding the new whoever they were – singer, movie star. After The Beatles and The Stones disappeared, there became a big gap.
“I was in England one day and I heard this song called ‘Take Me To The Pilot’ and I was really impressed. I thought, ‘Blimey, this kid can sing!’ Anyway, it turns out that he could play the piano as well. I went to photograph him and I couldn’t get anyone to publish the pictures. Vogue magazine, funnily enough, were the only ones. It was really ironic because they didn’t feel he wasn’t good-looking enough. But I stuck with him and he turned out to be one of the hugest biggest stars of all time. I really love working with Elton. He hated being photographed, of course, so I used to get it out the way as quickly as possible so he could get on with his music. But he was a great guy.”
His most recent book is entitled All About Bond. O’Neill is the only photographer in the world to have photographed all six 007s. “Yeah, I’m the only guy alive who’s done them all. I did Daniel Craig a couple of months ago for Esquire, and that sort of rounded it off. It’s a fun book.”
Not only has he photographed all of Her Majesty’s Secret Servicemen, but he’s also done an official portrait of Her Majesty herself. “That was a great honour,” he says. “I had about an hour with her. I had to do it in her annus horribilus, or whatever she called it, but, you know, if you make her laugh she is a lovely person. I told her a horse-racing joke.”
Unfortunately, he can’t remember the joke. “People always ask me that, but I can never remember the joke because I had just learned it from somebody. It wasn’t my idea of a funny joke, but the Queen found it funny. She loves all that.”
O’Neill was the man behind the lens for the very last picture taken of Winston Churchill in public. “He was coming out of hospital, and he’s in a chair with a cigar and all that. It was the last time he was seen in public.”
Does he become friendly with many of his subjects?
“Well, I became friendly with Churchill. He was quite a character, actually. He was a nice man. But I don’t actually because there comes a time in a relationship, you’ll end up sitting there drinking with them while somebody else is taking the pictures. I never wanted that situation. I do hang out with Michael Caine and Eric Clapton and Bill Wyman and that lot. We’re friends, but, you know, I don’t live in their pockets.”
Still commanding ten grand a shoot in his 75th year, O’Neill has done pretty well for himself financially over the years. “Yeah, I’ve made a good living. I never did it for the money. The money came secondary. I did it at the beginning to have something to do. I’ve worked hard all my life, really, I’ve never stopped working. It’s not the money I do it for – it’s getting the pictures published.”
Is it the camera or is it the photographer that takes a great picture?
“It’s always the photographer,” he insists. “Cameras get in my way! I hate cameras. I do, honestly. You know, there’s people like Peter Sellers, who was a camera nut. I mean he used to buy every new camera that came out. But all that stands in your way! It’s what you have here (taps temple) that you translate. You just need the camera to interpret it, but it’s you as a person and your whole concept that works.”
Who has been the most difficult person he’s ever photographed?
“Sex symbols when they get older, without naming names,” he smiles. “In their twenties, they take an hour to get ready. In their thirties, two hours. Forties, three hours. After that, it’s a nightmare! It could be up to five hours. But you just have to sit and wait, or don’t show up until about three hours has gone.”
What advice would he give to aspiring young photographers?
“Work hard, keep taking pictures, and try not to use digital. I don’t believe in digital. But work hard, that’s the thing. You have to keep taking pictures and believe in yourself.”
Does Terry O’Neill have a motto in life?
“I just want to wake up tomorrow morning, that’s all,” he laughs. “That’s my motto!”

Terry O’Neill is showing at Wandesford Quay Gallery and Cork City Hall until February 22.