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Terry O’Neill has been photographing the famous for 50 years. Innumerable icons have been charmed by his camera — from Raquel Welch to Kate Moss, from Richard Burton to Mick Jagger.

Sir Michael Caine was the man who made Terry O’Neill a star, though not a lot of people know that. When O’Neill first went to the US in 1966, to photograph Hugh Hefner at the Playboy man-sion in Chicago, the live-in bunnies thought he was nothing but the living embodiment of Caine’s blue-collar rogue. It was the Cockney accent that did it, a voice that the girls would knock on his door at night just to hear, then giggle and run away.

For the shy former jazz drummer, this was the world as it was meant to be, not the slow, foggy world of his childhood. “This was the world I’d read about, the world I’d dreamt about since I was a boy,” says O’Neill, “the world I wanted more than any other. The American girls loved English people in those days, especially English boys with a London accent.”

The working-class voice is not his only distinguishing feature. His sky-blue eyes still sparkle as they did 50 years ago when he was charming every miniskirted young waif in the Bag o’Nails or the Ad-Lib. Women used to say he had Paul Newman’s eyes; they still do.

In the 50 years since the little Irish cockney first tasted interna-tional success, he has become the celebrities’ Boswell, a pictorial diarist of the first order, and one of the world’s most accomplished

photographers. His forte is satisfaction, making the famous look as though they deserve their good fortune. He isn’t in the business of shattering egos and, unlike a lot of modern portrait photogra-phers, never sets out to demean his subjects. “What’s the point?” he says. “Who wouldn’t want to take a great picture of Frank Sinatra? A lot of photographers have an ulterior motive, but I’ve never been like that.”

He is rarely drawn to dark interpretations of his subjects’ motives, and he is more likely to shake the hand that feeds him than bite it. When he was on assignment to photograph Steve McQueen in the late 1960s, the taciturn tough guy refused to have O’Neill anywhere near him, treating him with antagonistic contempt. Calm as ever, O’Neill simply waited until McQueen had to take a telephone call, before shooting off a couple of rolls of film. Surprisingly, McQueen was pleased with the results. “He was a stunning, hit-you-in-the-eye guy, but underneath he was introverted, uptight and mistrustful,” says O’Neill. “I could never get to picture him like I wanted, so I had to take what I could get.”

To some, this might seem expedient, but O’Neill is careful never to intrude. Take his famous photograph of the Rolling Stones’ Bri-an Jones, the best picture he never took. “I found Brian collapsed in a heap at Malaga airport. He was drugged out of his brains and nobody knew who he was. I helped him on the plane and didn’t

TERRY O’NEILLA foreword by Dylan Jones

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Looking at Terry’s photographs is like gazing through a window at the most extraordinary and exciting moments of my life. I’m so glad he was with us throughout the madness: in his evocative and stylish photos he captured those moments as no other photographer could” ELTON JOHN

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