Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton photographed the British royal family, the Blitz and Hollywood, won Oscars for designing My Fair Lady and Gigi, and destroyed his own American career in one line of tiny handwriting. He came from a timber merchant's family and photographed his sisters at home with a Kodak before Vogue took him on in the 1920s; his portraits of the Bright Young Things, shot against cellophane and tinsel, made him the fashionable photographer of the decade. In 1938 he inserted the word kike, almost illegibly, into a decorative border in American Vogue; the issue was pulped, Conde Nast fired him, and he was finished in New York for years. The war rebuilt him: the Ministry of Information sent him to photograph bomb damage, the Middle East and the Far East, and his picture of a three-year-old survivor of the Blitz clutching a doll in a hospital bed ran on the cover of Life in September 1940 and is credited with shifting American opinion towards intervention. He then photographed the royal family for four decades, from Queen Elizabeth in 1939 to Charles and Anne as children, in images that consciously set out to make the monarchy look at once informal and mythic. He designed for stage and film, winning three Academy Awards, and kept diaries published in six volumes that are gossipy, malicious and among the best social records of the century. He had a long and unhappy attachment to Greta Garbo. A stroke in 1974 left him paralysed on the right side and he taught himself to photograph and draw with his left hand. His archive was sold to Sotheby s and dispersed. The kike incident is still the first thing many accounts of him mention.

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