He worked around stardom, but eschewed it himself. He was happy just eating fish and chips, listening to jazz, and taking pictures
, until eventually his archive had 400m negatives in it. There would have been far more if, by the 2000s, modern celebrities hadn’t ceased to interest him. Amy Winehouse was the last one he wanted to photograph.
What didn’t change was the nature of the work: catching that moment, being ready. He had scarcely graduated from a Box Brownie in 1959, totally self-taught, when he was sent to the Heathrowlounge to photograph people arriving and departing. He snapped a gent in a bowler hat and suit asleep on a bench with African chieftains in full regalia round him, and it turned out to be the home secretary: a famous man suddenly unguarded.
That picture earned him 25 quid. More to the point, it suggested a good way of approaching the stars. He would look for their human, vulnerable side, set things up, unobtrusively if he had to , and then start shooting. As he did, a dove settled by the bare white shoulder of Audrey Hepburn. Paul McCartney, playing the piano in a bar, suddenly raised his eyes to heaven as if amazed by the sound. Steve McQueen let his features relax as he took a phone call from a friend.
It was easy enough for him to blend in as he worked, for he was short, good-looking and carefully cheeky. His Romford accent thrilled grouchy Lee Marvin, and his horse-racing jokes disarmed the queen into a smile of genuine happiness. Women regularly fell for his china-blue eyes, and he ended up in bed with many of them, including Ava Gardner, the most beautiful woman he ever saw, and Ms Dunaway, to whom he was married for a while.
At heart he was ever the industrious Essex lad, working every day of the week. He didn’t like holidays. He also loathed digital photography, which was junk and a joke, and any sort of touching-up, which made him feel sullied. To the end, he clung to film cameras and to black-and-white as the best there was. Even so, there was always something about the finished print that dissatisfied him. If he had only stayed longer on that day, at that shoot, if he had just…he might have got something better.
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