It’s now five years since the passing of this photographer who took countless iconic pics. Our man Jason O’Toole spoke to him a few years before his death for an interview commissioned by his editor for a Sunday supplement magazine cover story but it was never published because a competitor beat them to the punch.
Terry O’Neill, according to the late film director Michael Winner, was as legendary for seducing some of the most beautiful screen sirens as he was for his iconic pictures of them.
The list of Terry’s lovers revealed in Michael Winner’s autobiography reads like a who’s who of Hollywood royalty: Raquel Welch, Ava Gardner, Julia Christie and Jean Shrimpton. “If I listed them all we’d run to a couple dozen pages,” Winner quipped in his book, describing Terry as, “without doubt the greatest seducer in the history of the world”.
Photo of Raquel Welch from the film ‘’Lady in Cement’’.
Ever the gentleman, the world famous photographer—who has the distinction of being the only snapper to work with every Bond actor over a 50-year timeframe—had always declined to divulge the names of his famous lovers . . . until I gently pushed him.
“He says I was with so-and-so and he named some of the girls. They are truthful, yes,” Terry sheepishly confessed when we met back in 2013 at a London café for an interview that ended up never seeing the light of day. [It was binned by my then newspaper editor because a rival newspaper ran their interview before us. I was frustrated, to say the least, because this was a much more in-depth interview.
To make matters worse, I had even filed the copy a full week earlier but the editor had foolishly decided to hold it for one of next weekend’s edition. It had even been laid out on the pages but was pulled at the last minute when an other newspaper ran their profile piece first. Right, rant over; back to the interview…]
I was taken aback when Terry, known as being a very private individual, so readily confessed to me to being involved with Raquel Welch, Ava Gardner, Julia Christie and Jean Shrimpton. Let’s not forget that there was also, of course, his marriages to Oscar-winner Faye Dunaway and Vera Day, dubbed the British Marilyn Monroe.
He was clearly in a surprisingly reflective frame of mind when we met, but the celebrated photographer insisted that he’d never resort to penning a sordid kiss-and-tell memoir.
“I could make a fortune but I don’t want to do an honest book. It’s all going to stay inside me. I respect the people too much,” said the London-Irish photographer, who was very proud of his Emerald Isle roots. “The greatest shame of my life is I was born English. I grew up like a Cockney, but I was conceived in the Bay of Dingle on my mother and father’s honeymoon.”
But why were some of the most beautiful women in the world attracted to him like moths to a flame?
“People say, ‘Why do I only go out with actresses and models?’ They were the only people I met, so that’s who you end up taking out. Because you take out all these famous actresses people think you are Jack The Lad. But I am not really—if I had met doctors I would have asked doctors out.”
Terry, who was clearly more comfortable behind the camera, shunned the limelight for years. It was only in the few years before his death that he reluctantly did the occasional press for exhibitions of his brilliant work held around the world. Notoriously guarded about his fascinating private life, Terry was known for preferring to focus on his work in any rare interview.
But when I chatted with him he also even opened up about his tempestuous marriages to Faye Dunaway and Vera Day.
“Vera Day was stunning. She was the English Marilyn Monroe,” he recalled nostalgically about the actress, who actually appeared alongside the Hollywood siren he name checks with Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).
“I met her because I was taking pictures of her. I unfortunately got married too young. I remember thinking, ‘What have I done?’ In the ’60s if you weren’t married by the time you were 21 people thought you were gay!”
It was the lure of working in Hollywood that eventually pulled them apart. “I was off in America for three months at a time and we just grew apart. When you’re that young you don’t realise the thing about being a father. You just don’t understand your responsibilities. I left her. I’ve all always regretted that, but what can I do?” he said.
It was an acrimonious divorce, but he and Vera were “really good friends now”, he stressed.
Terry’s career as a celebrated photography came about by pure accident. His Irish-Catholic mother wanted him to become a priest, but he joined the army with dreams of becoming a jazz musician. Later, he joined the British airline BOAC [now British Airways] as an air steward so he could fly transatlantic routes in order to play at music venues in the US. But the airline also assigned him to take photographs at the weekend of passengers for the in-flight magazine.
“I had to do pictures of people crying and saying goodbye. I ac- cidentally took a picture of a bloke in the pinstripes suite, who had fallen asleep, surrounded by African chieftains. It turned out the bloke was Rab Butler, the Home Secretary,” he remembered.
Terry sold the picture to the Daily Sketch, a now defunct national tabloid that was bought by Associated News in 1952, before merging with the Daily Mail in 1972. “Brian Fogarty was the Daily Sketch star photographer and asked would I work with him and cover for him,” he explained.
Tragedy struck soon later when Fogarty was killed in a plane crash. “This was a big shock to me. And I suddenly got offered his job,” Terry said. Terry’s initial assignment was to visit Abbey Road Studios to take the first ever press photograph of The Beatles for their first single, Please Please Me, in 1963.
"The Beatles in Treslong" is in the public domain under Creative Commons CC0 1.0. Source: Noord-Hollands Archief / Fotoburo de Boer
“Nobody had ever taken a picture of a pop group before. It was all the singers at the time. The photo editor had said, ‘Pop groups are going to be the next big thing’. I just got Ringo holding a cymbal and the guys holding a guitar. It was a very naïve picture,” he said.
“It was published and the paper sold out. They thought they’d struck gold, so they said, ‘Who else do you like?’ I liked The Rolling Stones, so I took them and they were horrified—they thought they were five prehistoric monsters!
“They said, ‘We will run them but you’ve got to get a good-look- ing group’. I got the Dave Clark Five. They were all great looking guys. They ran it as ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ in a double page spread. That was the real start of pop in newspapers. Then all the pa- pers started doing it. And that was the start of the pop scene. I started at the top in a way and I never really looked back.”
Terry had a good chuckle as he reflected back on how both he and The Beatles were convinced that they pop scene was only ever going to be a short-lived fad.
“We were all convinced that this thing was going to last a couple of years and we would have to get a proper job. Ringo wanted to run a chain of hairdresser’s salons! Mick Jagger used to joke about singing at 40. We used to talk about all this being over. We had no idea we were going to change the world,” he said, laughing at the memory of it all.
The self-disciplined Terry puts part of his own success down to his astute determination to stay away from drugs. He pointed out, “All I did was try marijuana once and it made me feel so strange I never went near it [again]. I saw the Beatles and the Stones under the influence of drugs and it wasn’t a world that I wanted. I had to get up the next day and they didn’t.”
With an ever-growing reputation, Terry soon found himself being invited to spend time photographing many leading movie stars when Hollywood descended on Europe because of the big tax breaks that made it cheaper to film here.
“I used to go and work on like Paul Newman’s movies and spend two weeks shooting him. I did Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra—you name them,” he said.
The affable Terry recounted this story to me about Paul Newman and Lee Marvin: “I remember once I went on a film with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin. I was employed for two days to shoot the film poster so I get to this place and I have to go to Denver. And I go to the set and told, ‘Good luck with getting good shots because no one is talking to Lee Marvin and he is not talking to anybody and you will have to go on trying to get this yourself!’
“So, I have two days and I walked straight up to him and he was leaning against the wall and I said, ‘Lee, I’m Terry O’Neill and I’m from London, England and I am over here to shoot your film poster’.
“He said, ‘You’re from London, England? I love the English’. And he shook my hand. I could feel the whole of the set behind me rise up in silent praise because I was the only one to get through to him. So I did all the shots and they were great shots. I mean, all these American stars, you could tell they were natural stars; they were not manufac- tured or something like that. And they were real men. I think the trouble today is they are all boys. There is no sort of men. I love Mickey Rourke, he is a great character. And he is still a kid. At heart, you know?”
He was not impressed with how things were run in his latter years. “Now if you get a photograph of a movie star you have to do it in a hotel and you are controlled—they want one shot here, one shot there—and they want to control the copy. It’s a joke now,” he said.
Nor was he impressed with modern technology. “What people see now is all retouched. Pictures are about grabbing moments. To get a great picture is what it’s about—not using a digital camera and everyone crowds around that machine to see. That is not photography,” he said.
When asked to pick one of his most memorable times on a film set, Terry didn’t name an instant classic but rather Frank Sinatra’s Lady in Cement (1968). Perhaps it’s little wonder Terry selects such an unmemorable film as it was on location with Sinatra in San Francisco when he first met the leading co-star Raquel Welch—one of his many lovers, according to Michael Winner’s candid memoir.
Terry had blagged his way into Sinatra’s inner circle after the singer’s ex-wife Ava Gardner—yet another of Terry’s many conquests—wrote a letter of introduction for the photographer to the blue-eyed crooner.
“I became friendly with Ava Gardner on a film,” is all Terry will coyly say about their relationship. “I said, ‘I’ve got a chance to pho- tograph your ex-husband’. She said, ‘I’ll write you a letter’. Really, I was more interested in photographing Raquel Welch!”
He said all this in a tone that makes it clear that he was mes- merised with the iconic sex symbol.
“Anyway, I gave this letter to Sinatra and he looks at it and reads it and smiles. And he says, ‘You’re with me’. And the next three weeks, I went everywhere with him. Every single place. And he was fantas- tic to me. And then I worked on-and-off with him over the next 30 years,” he recalled.
One of Terry’s most iconic photographs was of Brigitte Bardot smoking a cigar, with the wind blowing her tousled hair over her seductive eyes.
“That was the last frame on the role of film and it turned out to be one of the bestselling shots of all time,” he said.
Terry sounded clearly smitten when talking about her, but it also appeared that the French beauty was at least one sex symbol that wasn’t seduced by his charms.
“She was incredible to work with, although she didn’t speak English. She was always in love with somebody or other, so you could never get to talk to her. She would dive off to the trailer with her boyfriend,” he told me.
“I always thought she was a little sex symbol, but she was about five foot nine and she had great legs. A stunning looking woman. She could have been a much bigger star than she became.”
Did Terry have any regrets about any possible unrequited romances?
“No, not really,” he shrugged modestly. “I went out with the girls I wanted to go out with.”
It was another one of Terry’s iconic photographs that sparked off his most famous relationship: that with Faye Dunaway. Their romance blossomed in 1978 after he took the celebrated image that captures the Hollywood star appearing forlorn as she sits with her Oscar for the film Network (1976) at a breakfast table in front of the swimming pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with the morning newspapers strewn around her feet.
It may be a great picture, but Terry describes their marriage in 1984 as “a mistake”.
Was it love at first sight?
“No, not really. I had met her before but she was married. I took that famous Hollywood picture and it all started from there. She was a great looking woman. I never really wanted to be married to an ac- tress because I don’t like that. We were together a long time,” he said.
During their time together, the couple had a son, Liam Dunaway O’Neill, born in 1980. Faye publicly stated at the time that she had given birth to their son, but Terry later sensationally contradicted her by stating that their son was adopted.
He explains that Liam was six-years-old before being told the truth. “She was his mother’s and that was her decision. She just wanted to protect him. I just went along with her wishes.”
Was Terry still in regular contact with his son? “I talk to him once a week. He lives in LA. He’s acting in one of the films she’s doing now. I think she wants him to be an actor, which I wouldn’t recommend, but he is,” he said, laughing.
Terry revealed he left Dunaway after becoming dissatisfied with their Hollywood lifestyle. The couple officially divorced in 1987.
“I really didn’t enjoy being married to a movie star. You lose your own personality. You end up being called Mr. Dunaway instead of Mr. O’Neill,” he said. “The worst thing is to be surrounded by yes people once you get somewhere. I tried to do it; I produced a film, Mommie Dearest (1981)
[starring Faye]. It’s not a world I really like. It’s cutthroat actually.
“And I just thought, ‘That’s it! I don’t want this any more. I don’t want to sink into an oblivion; I’ve got my own career’. I just had it. It just festered.”
He continued, “Yes, of course, we had some good times, but I had to get on with my life. I didn’t want to live in the shadow of somebody. I was used to being my own boss.
“She didn’t want to get divorced and it dragged on, but it was the best thing to do. Actually, I’m not supposed to talk about her because I signed an agreement when I got divorced.”
Why was he asked to sign a confidentiality agreement as part of the divorce?
“I think movie stars get paranoid about it. I mean, I don’t care; I don’t want to talk about it.”
So much so that Terry admitted that he couldn’t even think of one nice anecdote about their relationship. “It is all a blank to me now. It is all a blur. I wiped it all out. If something goes wrong I don’t really want to remember it. I just cancel it out of my mind. I don’t want to get down about anything; I just want to keep a positive attitude during life. All relationships are painful, you know?”
Terry liked to joke that his third marriage to Laraine Ashton—a former model agency executive—was most definitely “my last”.
It was some six years before his death when we spoke and by that stage he rarely took photographs anymore. He instead prefered to focus on exhibiting his work around the world. But would he not have liked to have worked with contemporary stars like Colin Farrell and Jude Law?
“They just haven’t got it. I’m not really interested in photographing anybody. I haven’t photographed anybody who was anybody for nearly 50 years. There is nobody today I really want to photograph. They all look the same to me. All the guys wear black suit and don’t really stand out,” he said matter-of-factly.
“The last person I wanted to photograph was Nelson Mandela, who I did for a week for his 90th birthday. It was a wonderful experi- ence. When he left he gave me a little wave from the car because he’s frail and I nearly burst into tears. I realised I was working with a truly great man.”Battling bowel cancer in 2006 had a profound effect on Terry’s own outlook on life.
“I only live really for tomorrow. I’m just glad to wake up every morning and have a brand new day now. I don’t think about the past because the past is gone. I just look forward to the future. I just want to get into as many countries as I can to sell my photographs and have a great life,” he said.
It’s a shame Terry wasn’t tempted to put the unexpurgated version of his remarkable life down on paper—one that sounded like it would have easily rivalled that of Errol Flynn’s salacious memoir when it comes to seducing Hollywood starlets.
Terry passed away in November 2019. He was one of the good guys. RIP.
