Angus McBean: Portraits

Cecil Beaton called him the best photographer in Britain; Lord Snowdon declared him a genius. It is no exaggeration to say that Angus McBean revolutionized portraiture in the 1930s, or that he immortalized the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, and Elizabeth Taylor. Blending wit, drama, and fantasy with the consummate skill of a master photographer, McBean was the most prominent theater photographer of his generation and, along with Beaton, the last of the British avant-garde studio photographers. For the first time since his death in 1990, McBean’s photographs of stars such as Vivien Leigh, Peggy Ashcroft, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Audrey Hepburn and his rarely seen color prints from the 1960s of the Beatles, Maria Callas, and Shirley Bassey are brought together in this fascinating book. Terence Pepper’s intriguing account of McBean’s life and work includes extracts from the photographer’s unpublished autobiography. Terence Pepper is curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He is the author of The Man Who Shot Garbo: The Photographs of Clarence Sinclair Bull, High Society: Photographs 1897-1914, and monographs on Lewis Morley and Dorothy Wilding.