“When Ava Gardner first walked onto the set of Tam Lin, I was terrified,” chuckles Keith Hamshere. As the stills photographer on the set of the film, in 1969, he’d been given a “long list of Do Nots”. At the top was a command never to photograph the gin-swilling film star with a drink in her hand. “I was told she’d thrown the drink at the last photographer to try that!” He was also warned not to get too close to her, stand in her eyeline or make any noise. As the Nikon camera he was using had quite a loud shutter, Hamshere spent most of that day cowering behind a tree, poking his camera lens out for wide shots.
“But the next day,” he tells me over the phone, “Ava saw the photos and was really complimentary. She was a delight and I wondered why I’d ever been so nervous. She ended up inviting me to parties at her house in London, and at the end of the shoot signed a photograph I took of her and her little dog, saying it had been a ‘joy’ to work with me!”
Now 78, Hamshere began his showbusiness career – in which he’d go on to take photographs on the sets of Superman, Star Wars and Indiana Jones films – as an 11-year-old child actor, strutting about the stage of the London Palladium, playing his ukulele for Max Bygraves. His first agent was Joan Collins’s father, Joseph, and he played the lead in the original 1960 production of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver!
He hoofed it much harder than any child actor would be allowed to today. In his forthcoming memoir, Life Through an Aperture, he recalls appearing on stage “for 14 long months, six days a week non-stop. I did have a bit of a breakdown, caused by stress, really, and suffered inflammation of my throat and was signed off for a week, but otherwise I was on every night and every matinee. I never really knew how it came to an end, but I think it was partly manipulated by Walt Disney, who had come to see the show.”
Uncle Walt cast Hamshere in a minor role in 1962’s In Search of the Castaways, starring Hayley Mills, with whom he became “great pals”. He recalls the larks they had running around the Pinewood lot and riding the studio’s stable of horses. “At one point, Mills got wet filming a water sequence and left her trousers drying on a heater; I remember her coming into the corridor, shouting ‘Fire!’” It was in sharp contrast to the experience he would have filming Michael Winner’s Play It Cool, released the same year.
“Michael could be kind to people in times of personal crisis,” recalls Hamshere. “But he was so rude sometimes. He’d shout through a megaphone right into their ears, almost blowing up their eardrums. I remember people running away, crying.” The crew got their revenge, though. Hamshere recalls the director lowering his megaphone on one occasion, unaware that it had left behind a circle of black boot polish framing his mouth.
While filming Castaways, Hamshere had developed an interest in photography and that film’s on-set photographer, Johnny Jay, offered him an assistant’s job on Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I didn’t really know who Stanley Kubrick was then,” he tells me. “I was just a kid. But he was one of those charismatic people you realise has ‘something’ when you walk into a room. You’re aware that all the arrows are pointing to him.”
Perhaps it was Hamshere’s youth and lack of awe that allowed him to forge an easygoing working relationship with the notoriously perfectionist director. “He came up to me early on and asked what lenses I was using, he offered to help carry a bag – from that moment, things went well.”
In his book, Hamshere explains that Kubrick, a director who thought nothing of pushing an actor through 70 takes of a single line, could be so intensely disturbed by the click of a camera on set that he had a glass box – imagine something like a telephone booth – constructed for Jay and Hamshere to stand inside to muffle the sound. When the photographers found they were struggling to breathe in their cubicle, Kubrick had an oxygen tank attached to the top and the gas pumped in through a pipe. Alas, the cylinder also made a hissing sound that irritated the director and the whole device was removed from the set.
Despite Hamshere’s close relationship with Kubrick, the director fired him after he refused to cancel a pre-arranged two-day honeymoon and return to the set. “I’d got permission to go and get married. It was only three days off. It was all agreed and then things changed. I said I wouldn’t go back in, and that was that,” says Hamshere. “It wouldn’t happen today. It was very upsetting…”
Did he fear his career was over? “I wasn’t sure. It felt huge and it was very hurtful. But years later, Kubrick phoned me up as if nothing had happened and asked me to come and shoot some photographs of his wife’s artwork. I’m glad we made up.”
Hamshere’s final film was Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), and his photographic career saw “many changes in the industry. When I started out, all the film stars would be sitting around on set, chatting and joking,” he says. “By the time I finished, they were all holed up in their trailers.”
And the size of those trailers became competitive. “I won’t say which film set I was on,” says the ever-discreet photographer, “but I do remember one huge trailer being brought onto a set. It was so disruptive: people couldn’t get through the car park or into the offices. Apparently, this thing even had a gym in it. It appeared that some of these stars just wanted a trailer bigger than the last one, and they didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
By comparison, he says, the golden-age stars commanded respect by their mere presence. “When Bette Davis walked onto a set, you could hear a pin drop. It just isn’t the same when there are always 16 assistants shouting at the top of their lungs, crew on their phones…” Hamshere counts Robert Mitchum and Katharine Hepburn among his favourite older stars. “Katharine Hepburn summoned me to her dressing room and my first thought was what have I done wrong? But she was lovely. She wanted to thank me for my work and presented me with a silver salt cellar, engraved from her to me. It’s a treasured possession. She told me to use it, although I never have!”
Hamshere notes that all the big stars are protective of their image. “I’d never take pictures of them relaxing in the bar after shoots. They’re all entitled to their downtime. But some like to involve you in the process of choosing the right shots. When I was on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Harrison Ford suggested we have a couple of beers as he selected the photos he liked. He was laid-back and funny. We had a projector set up and he went “hmm”, “ahh” and “yeah” as the pictures came up on screen, for two to three hours. Lovely guy.” He also notes that Pierce Brosnan – whom he photographed on all his James Bond sets – “became a good friend and was always kind to everybody”.
Hamshere feels great warmth, too, towards Anthony Hopkins (whom he first shot on the set of Shadowlands, 1993), Brad Pitt (Spy Game, 2001) and Angelina Jolie (Maleficent, 2014). “Brad was into photography when we met, so we talked quite a bit. Then he’d come on set to visit Angelina, who was very sweet. When he saw me, he would always come over and say hello.”
But he did find method actors trickier. Harvey Keitel (Saturn 3, 1980) was the first he encountered and the memory makes him scowl. “I’d never been told not to look a person in the eye before! I mean, at the end of the day, what we do is silly. When you compare the job to firefighting, working in the NHS, we are just playing around. Having fun. Nobody dies. I know it matters and you want the films to be good, but they are just films.”
He says the worst directors he saw in action were Otto Preminger – “A bully, awful, don’t talk to me about him” – and Winner. The best were Kubrick, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen. “They were all guys in total control of the train set. When somebody knows what they are doing, then everybody else can get on with the job. They were all decent and had a sense of fun – although they could all get impatient when things were not running correctly.”
Since he came up through an era when many women now claim to have been abused in the industry, did Hamshere witness any bad behaviour? “No. Nothing like that,” he says. “Though I was out on one film set visited by Harvey Weinstein, in the 1990s,” he shudders. “We were in Tunisia, and Martha – wife of Dino De Laurentiis [the Italian film producer] – whispered in my ear: ‘That is an evil man. Evil!’ So people definitely knew about him.”
But Woody Allen – with whom he worked on Cassandra’s Dream (2007) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) – always struck Hamshere as a kind and respectful colleague. “He was always eating tomato sandwiches on set, and he was the only director I ever met who ran a set which started at 8.30am and finished at 5.30pm sharp. When I brought my nine-year-old grandson on set, he noticed me setting up some photos of us together and photobombed them, which was really quite sweet.” He sighs. “Of course, in my job, you see one side of people and you never really know what to think about how they are later labelled in the tabloids. Brad and Angelina seemed so happy to me…”
Hamshere enjoyed living through an era of rapid technological changes. The glass box Kubrick constructed for him was replaced a decade later by a camera-silencing “blimp”. The hours he once put into special effects – erasing ropes from shoots of a dangling Christopher Reeve as Superman or adding lightsabers into Star Wars snaps – were reduced to seconds by the digital age. “I loved the early digital stuff,” he says. But now he worries the art may be lost entirely. “These days, anybody can do a lot of it with a mobile phone in a minute. I feel sorry for modern photographers.”
But Hamshere looks back with pride on more than 50 years on the world’s biggest film sets. “Not bad for a kid from Ilford who started out with only a ukulele in his hands!”
Life Through an Aperture: The Films and Photography of Keith Hamshere (History Press, £30) will be published on Aug 22
