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An assignment with Elizabeth Taylor opened the door to fame for celebrity photographer Douglas Kirkland, writes Suzanna Clarke
`I happen to be associated with celebrity work, but my first love is photography. I enjoy the attention that a celebrity photographer gets.'
FOR a man who has taken photographs of celebrities ranging from Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe to Michael Jackson and Angelina Jolie, Douglas Kirkland began with more modest aspirations.
"I never thought I would end up where I did," he says from home in Hollywood Hills, ahead of his exhibition, Douglas Kirkland: A Life in Pictures, at GoMA for the Brisbane Festival.
Kirkland has an honest and kind manner that has proved disarming in persuading the jaded famous to be photographed. Take his encounter with Elizabeth Taylor in 1958.
Kirkland was 24 and had just started working for Look magazine, then the competitor of Life.
"I was photographing bathing suits on a beach in California, when my boss called me. He said, `Elizabeth Taylor hasn't given an interview since Cleopatra' - she had been ill with double pneumonia. `She is going to talk to us, but she's said no photos. I want you to go anyway.' So I went to Las Vegas and sat very quietly during the interview. At the end, I walked up to her and looked straight into those violet eyes and said, `Elizabeth, I am new with this publication. Can you imagine what it would mean to me to be able to photograph you?' I kept holding her hand and didn't let go. And she said `Yes'.
"At 8.30pm the following evening, I was in her hotel suite and she was sitting, beautifully dressed and made-up. She was so young and very beautiful; so pristine it was unimaginable. There was a huge scar on her throat as the result of an operation they had to do because of the pneumonia. She said, `I am just going to let that be seen - I am going to wear it like...