Home

This iconic shot was taken in March 1977 at The Beverley Hills Hotel and is probably O’Neill’s best-known work. Dunaway had just won the Best Actress Academy Award for her role in ‘Network’. She had previously been nominated in 1967 for ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and in 1974 for ‘Chinatown’. Dunaway was O’Neill’s girlfriend at the time and they later went on to marry.

O’Neill said of the portrait: “I call this picture ‘The Morning After’. I wanted to get a different kind of ‘Oscar’ picture – one to illustrate what the award meant to actors and actresses. Funny (sic) enough, I was photographing her on an assignment for People Magazine at the time — they always did a piece on the girl they think is going to win. Anyway, they picked Faye Dunaway, and while we were doing the pictures, I said to her, ‘I’ve been to the Oscars before. If you win, they always take the same pictures of you receiving the statue in the press room.’ I knew that wasn’t the real story — the real story is the next day, when they realize suddenly they’re getting all these offers to do films, their value goes from $100,000 to $10 million, and they’re just sort of stunned. I wanted to capture that, so I told her my idea, and she was sport enough to do it early in the morning at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She got up at 6 a.m., and we got that great picture. She hadn’t slept and the implications of a watershed event in her career were only just beginning to dawn on her. It’s become one of the most Hollywood pictures of all time”.

Vanity Fair said: "No image better captures both the allure and the loneliness of celebrity than Terry O'Neill's 1977 photograph of his then girlfriend Faye Dunaway reflecting by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Academy Award she won the previous night posing on the breakfast table."