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This month, New York’s Fotografiska museum opens “Stars,” an exhibition of Terry O’Neill’s photographic love affair with fame. The child of Irish immigrants, O’Neill began his career in the photography unit of London’s Heathrow airport, where Laurence Olivier was among his first subjects. Over the following 50 years (the 110 works included in the retrospective span from 1963 to 2013), he would shoot countless other idols of song, sport, and screen—the Beatles, Audrey Hepburn, David Bowie, Twiggy, Muhammad Ali, and David Beckham among them.
“We forget how important glamor and celebrity became during the 1960s and ’70s,” says Yoram Roth, Fotografiska’s executive chairman. “Terry defined that visual language.”
O’Neill, who died of cancer in 2019, was a star himself, prone to bravado and self-invention. Robin Morgan, his longtime friend and the president of O’Neill’s estate, adds that the photographer “could walk into a room and light it up, no matter who was there: royalty, rock stars, movie stars. He was so charismatic.”
Perhaps the most iconic photograph in “Stars” is The Morning After (1977), a portrait of Faye Dunaway following her Oscar win for Network. Clad in a silk dressing gown, she lounges by the pool in a deserted Beverly Hills Hotel, newspapers littering the ground below her and the golden trophy glittering by her side. Despite going to bed at 3 a.m., Dunaway agreed to show up at 6 a.m. to take the picture. Endlessly referenced and recreated over subsequent decades, it captures the fantasy—and disillusion—of Hollywood triumph.
Elsewhere in the show, tennis legend Billie Jean King reclines on a bed with her rackets. Sean Connery, the original James Bond, reads Life in a marble bath. A shirtless Elton John poses on his private plane. Far from humanizing the subjects, these private images only magnify their myths. They capture the dream of a personal life as camera-ready as one’s public one.
If celebrity, as John Updike put it, “is a mask that eats into the face,” the subjects of O’Neill’s imagery disappear entirely behind their personas, even without the grandeur of mansions, movie sets, or stadiums. The 1971 picture of a windswept Brigitte Bardot, a cigarette cocked between her lips, revels in her celestial beauty. O’Neill’s emphasis on the architecture of her face echoes the framing of early cinematic masters like Josef von Sternberg and Federico Fellini. Similarly, Patrick Swayze, pictured in a denim shirt before an American flag, recalls old matinée heartthrobs like Cary Grant and Tab Hunter. These images do not aim to expose the interior lives of Swayze or Bardot, but rather to celebrate the power of their exteriors. As Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond, a silent film star, once raved: “We didn’t need dialogue; we had faces.”
Of course, these endlessly seductive images are rarely honest. When O’Neill photographed Ava Gardner in 1972, the movie goddess had endured three divorces and a battle with addiction since her Hollywood debut. Yet in front of O’Neill’s camera, Gardner appears luminous and lineless. His glamorizing vision recreates the box office magnet once beloved by Howard Hughes, Earnest Hemingway, and millions of fans. She is not the complicated, grown-up woman in a tracksuit that Tom Zimberoff photographed for the last time several years later.
Walking through his glitzy portraits of pop titans, one suspects O’Neill would be repulsed by the vulnerability and accessibility that both social and traditional media now embrace. Before the (mostly) unvarnished forms of self-presentation now favored online, the illusion of perfect glamour had already faded through the “stars— they’re just like us!” tabloid journalism of the aughts. In 2018, O’Neill told The Telegraph, “There’s nobody around now I’d want to photograph. Amy Winehouse was the last person—real talent. All the proper stars have gone.”
“Stars” brings a bygone era back in all of its elegance, energy, and artifice.
“Stars” is on view at Fotografiska New York through September 16.
