Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a photographer. He left school at 14 to pursue a career as a jazz drummer,

but he ended up working in a photographic unit at Heathrow Airport. It was there that he captured

the then home secretary, Rab Butler, immaculately dressed and fast asleep on a bench.

It was the making of him.

He became the youngest photographer in Fleet Street and in the 60s and 70s his pictures of the rich and famous from the Beatles to

Brigitte Bardot from Richard Burton to Frank Sinatra appeared all over the

world. He married a Hollywood star and moved briefly from taking pictures to making them, but by the age of

47 he was back in London alone and broke.

That was more than 15 years ago.

Today he's back at the top of his profession. Celebrities have been my world, he says. I know

more about people looking through the camera than I do talking to them. He is Terry O'Neill.

It's a very privileged view I suppose you get Terry isn't it looking through it because you don't have that embarrassment of looking into their eyes. They can be embarrassed but not you.

Now I mean to see a face close up on a small screen in front of you is incredible.

You do see right through to the soul, funny enough.

I mean it sounds an old-fashioned thing to say, but you do do and you're totally in control of the whole

picture-taking thing anyway.

Quite a powerful position isn't it?

No, you've got to know what you want to get out of somebody.

I mean lots of people just stand back and think a

famous person's going to walk in and make a picture. It's the other way around

...