The portrait painter

TERRY O'Neill is one of the great names of British photography, an image maker to rank alongside Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson, Terence Donovan, David Bailey and Patrick Litchfield.

He has photographed The Queen, the king of the ring Muhammad Ali and the leader of the Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra; he had a 15-year relationship with actress Faye Dunaway, his former wife.

O'Neill may be famous in his own right yet he would not consider himself a celebrity, not in the terms of his retrospective exhibition and accompanying book, Celebrity.

"Originally I wasn't too sure about that Celebrity title but it turns out to be spot on because everyone is a 'celebrity' now. I believe the people I filmed in the Sixties and Seventies were from the last age of real celebrities. Now they come out of reality TV shows, have their moment of fame and two years later you have forgotten them," he says.

"Today they haven't got the character, but someone such as Sinatra, when he came into a room, you just felt it. He had this electricity about him. You just sensed something was going to happen and nine times out of ten it did."

As O'Neill talks he is surrounded by 30 of his iconic images in the Celebrity show, newly on display in an upstairs room and landing at Nunnington Hall, near Helmsley. The show had a six-month run at the National Portrait Gallery from last autumn and sister versions are running in New York and San Francisco.

The hall walls smoulder with nostalgia: Bardot's bee-stung pout with a cigar between those lips; The Beatles in a cramped space, Ringo awkwardly holding a cymbal above his head; a strutting Frank Sinatra, his body double and his goons in specs on the prowl in 1968; David Bowie, gaunt and out of it, slumped in a seat beside a leaping dog, from his Diamond Dogs period; Marianne Faithfull in an unholy union of innocence and pulchritude in a basque in 1964.

"They were real stars, and they were projected differently. Today you can't get close to them because their PR people put all the blocks up and that means they're killing it. That's why the paparazzi have come to the fore," he says. "They're a pack, and they're hungry, very hungry, and I would back the star against the paparazzi every time."

Ah, the paparazzi with their long-lens intrusion and digital cameras. O'Neill, dapper in his mandarin suit and collarless white shirt, does not look like the rushing blur of today's press men. "It's ridiculous now when they're covering a film premiere or they're chasing someone; they're just like animals. We're one of the few countries that allows that to happen," he says.

"Now they just use motor-drives and if they get something, they get something, if they don't, they don't. The way they act towards stars is so rude: they think they own them."

These may sound like the antediluvian sentiments of a man in his 60s in the grip of nostalgia - Londoner O'Neill was born in 1938 - but you sense more his sadness at the breakdown of trust between photographer and star subject. "That thing of getting to know your subject has gone. I ended up working with Frank Sinatra for ten years, because when he was singing at the Fountainbleau Hotel at night and filming the first of his Tony Rome films, The Detective in the day, I spent two weeks working on the story. Back then, you get to know them, they got to know you and trust you.

"To work for Sinatra was the highest compliment you could get because he was razor sharp, and Dean Martin used to be great too. Those stars used to be men, where today's stars seem like boys."

O'Neill had been a budding jazz musician himself, playing drums in London clubs at the age of 14 before doing his National Service. His career in photography developed by chance.

"I came out of the Army in 1958 and joined BOAC because I thought working for a transatlantic airline would be a cheap way to regularly visit the USA to play jazz. I was told you would have a day's flight, then three days off before flying back, so that meant I could play three days at a time."

Missing the intake of stewards, he was offered a position in the airline's photographic unit. He took the job and began a weekly course at Ealing Art College. "I preferred going to college one day a week to working," he says.

He had never considered a career in photography until that point.

"I didn't think I had the flair for it; I used to think photography was the work of geniuses, but I found I had the feel for it. I just didn't have the technique at first, but I soon did and I learnt that in photography every rule you learn, you break."

His move into photojournalism came through a stroke of luck. While freelancing at Heathrow, he happened across a man sleeping in the terminal, seated among African chiefs.

"I didn't know who he was but it turned out to be RAB Butler, the Home Secretary, and a reporter from the Sunday Dispatch asked if his paper could have the film," O'Neill recalls.

The picture duly made the front page of that Sunday's edition. "The picture editor immediately said he would like me to start working for him on Saturdays."

At 21, he was to become one of Fleet Street's youngest hotshots, shooting celebrity pictures for the Daily Sketch, making good use of his musical grounding to befriend the young Beatles and Rolling Stones.

"I remember sitting and talking with them at the Ad Lib Club and we were all laughing at the thought of Mick still playing at 40, but look at him now. At 25 you just didn't think it would last, and that was the same for me in my profession," he says.

"But when I got to Hollywood, all Fred Astaire wanted to talk about was the Beatles and the Stones and it was then that I realised that if he thought they were fantastic, then maybe it could last, and I carried on from there."

O'Neill had turned his back on Fleet Street after three years at the Daily Sketch. "I was sent to cover a funeral where all of Fleet Street was there. Children had died in a crash in Norway, and I was among all these parents, and it was like being in a Fellini film," he says.

"I just felt like it was wrong. When I said I wanted to leave I was sent in to see the editor, and he said 'You're finished the moment you're out of here'. Pretty scary! But he was wrong and he could not have said anything better to spur me on."

In the 1970s, O'Neill crossed the Pond to shoot the stars of Hollywood for the likes of Playboy, Life and Premiere and he continues to work for newspapers and magazines in his 66th year.

Never star-struck, and dismissive of gossip magazine photo-spreads - "I never see people actually reading Hello or OK, they just flick through the pages" - O'Neill says he would not wish to photograph any of today's generation of celebrities.

What about the ubiquitous Mr Beckham?

"I went to a wedding he was attending and studied him and he had this wonderful nature about him, but there is so much going on in his life that I don't think anything I would get would be 'real'. It would take being around him for two or three weeks to get that," he says.

O'Neill looks back fondly to a time when a truthful portrait, warts and all, was the true art of the portrait photographer. Now cosmetic surgery and cosmetic doctoring of photographs tell a different story.

"You don't have to be a photographer today if you can handle a digital camera and re-touching gear, but I don't see the point in making anyone look perfect because no one is perfect."

Celebrity, Terry O'Neill's exhibition of photographic portraits, runs at Nunnington Hall, near Helmsley, until June 25. Open Wednesday to Sunday, plus Bank Holidays and Tuesdays in June, 1.30pm to 5pm (last admission). Normal admission charges apply. Telephone: 01439 748283.

Updated: 11:38 Tuesday, May 04, 2004