Actress Faye Dunaway slumps by a pool, seemingly looking with disdain at the Oscar she had picked up the night before for Network.
The 1977 shot is one of a catalogue of iconic images taken by her then-boyfriend Terry O’Neill, a genius behind the lens best remembered for capturing the faces and the mood of the swinging Sixties.
O’Neill, 81, who had prostate cancer, died on Saturday at his home in Battersea, south-west London.
Singer Elton John, 72, led the tributes, saying: “He was brilliant, funny and I absolutely loved his company.”
Ex-Mirror Royal photographer Kent Gavin said O’Neill was “a true icon who will be sadly missed”.
O’Neill was born in Romford, Essex, in 1938. His dad Leonard worked at the Ford car plant, mum Josephine was a housewife.
In his teens, O’Neill dreamed of being a drummer and took a job at an airline, hoping it would get him to New York to play the jazz clubs.
Part of his job was to photograph the travellers, and one candid shot changed his life.
He said: “I happened upon a well-dressed, bowler-hatted man taking a quick nap in the departures area, and he was surrounded by African chieftains, in their regalia.”
The snoozing man turned out to be Home Secretary Rab Butler, and the photo earned O’Neill a job at the Daily Sketch paper.
He said: “I was off and running.”
In 1963, he was sent to photograph The Beatles, and he later said: “That assignment changed the course of my career.”
When The Rolling Stones asked him to take their pictures, O’Neill decided to make them look like “a travelling blues band” and asked them to bring suitcases.
He said: “Keith Richards told me, years later, that the suitcase he used was the first one he had ever owned. It still had the tissue paper inside.”
O’Neill’s roll call of subjects also included David Bowie, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sir Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela.
The Queen was the only one who made him nervous.
He said: “I researched some horse-racing jokes to break the ice and, thank God, she laughed.”
With a marriage to actress Vera Day behind him, he wed Faye Dunaway in 1983, but it only lasted four years.
He leaves third wife Laraine Ashton and three children.
O’Neill, who collected a CBE in October, looked back on his career in a recent interview.
He said: “When I look at photos of all the icons I’ve shot, Mandela, Churchill, Sinatra, the memories come back and I think, ‘Yeah, I did all right’.”
