Cornel Lucas: Shooting stars

In 1948, a young photographer named Cornel Lucas was walking between sound stages at Denham Film Studios – home of Alexander Korda’s production company – when he heard his name being called.

“I understand you get on well with female artists?” asked the man who had been looking for him.

Lucas nodded. He had six sisters, he explained, and that had given him an advantage. Why?

“Would you like to photograph Marlene Dietrich tomorrow?”

Lucas was 28. He’d owned a Box Brownie since he was 11, worked in film labs since he was 15 and in the stills department at the film studio since the end of the war, but none of that – nor any of his sisters – had prepared him for Dietrich, who was in need of a photographer because she’d just fired her last. He said yes.

The next day, Lucas prepared a set. He lit it carefully, and arranged some suitcases on which he would ask Dietrich to perch. She arrived wearing a mink cape that had been made for her in Paris to the tune of £10,000, sat patiently, and demanded to see the proofs the following day.
At that second encounter, she took an eyeliner pencil and a huge magnifying glass from her handbag, and marked the proofs with the letter “X” or “O”. The Xs, she explained, were rejects. The Os were to be retouched. Then she shook Lucas’s hand. “Thank you very much, Mr Lucas,” she said. “Join the club.”

^{Marlene Dietrich photographed by Cornel Lucas in 1948}
The “club” Lucas joined was a dream factory – Britain’s answer to Hollywood. While Clarence Sinclair Bull headed up the stills department at MGM, Lucas was given his own studio at Pinewood (which had merged with Denham), built on the site of an old swimming pool.
Not only did he produce portraits of the stars who came to work there, he could make a younger actor's career, or break it. One of the first things a would-be starlet was asked to do was have a portrait taken by Lucas. A screen test was only part of it; if the stills didn’t turn out well, a contract was out of the question. Lucas went on to become the only stills photographer to be awarded a Bafta, for services to the film industry.
‘I met him when I was 18,” says Susan Travers, who was married to Lucas until his death just over a year ago, at the age of 92. “The Rank Organisation wanted to put me on to contract, so they sent me down to Pinewood for a photographic session. He was very charming, but he didn’t like what I was wearing, so he lent me his sweater, and a coat.” The resulting image – taken in 1957 – is about to be used on the banner advertising an exhibition of Lucas’s work at the National Theatre.
Travers had always wanted to act. Her mother, Linden Travers – with whom Lucas photographed her later, in a beautiful double portrait that looks almost like a reflection – was a well-known actress who had worked with Hitchcock in The Lady Vanishes. (Indeed, Susan Travers later had a small role in a Hitchcock film too, though she’s dismissive of the part she played in Frenzy.)
But in the event she turned down every contract she was offered in 1957 – not just Rank’s, but one from Twentieth Century Fox and others too. She opted for a marriage contract instead, and did a good deal of live television work while bringing up the four children she had with Lucas.
Travers confirms the “ease with women” that Lucas’s experience with his sisters gave him. And it was just as well, since the stars who passed through his studio all had their quirks. Katharine Hepburn refused to wear make-up (she would rub her cheeks with crushed ice instead, to make them glow) and didn’t want any artificial set-ups, so in order to cast some light on the “casual” scene Hepburn had agreed to, Lucas would have to make surreptitious arrangements for one of the electricians in the gantry to shine a beam on her from overhead.
Lauren Bacall, similarly, asked to be photographed in the relaxed environment of her apartment, and wouldn’t allow Lucas to retouch the results. Brigitte Bardot came in to his studio in 1955 – she was young and self-conscious and kept putting her wrist up against her mouth in order to hide her slightly buck teeth. The publicity director, who was watching, laughed and said: “She’s like a sex kitten.” That, according to Lucas, is how the phrase was born.

^{Brigitte Bardot photographed by Cornel Lucas in 1955}
Diana Dors, on the other hand, was – as Lucas recalled in a book of his work – “a tremendous self-publicist”. She dreamt up her own famous stunt at the Venice Film Festival in 1955, in which she appeared in a gondola in a long coat. She had warned Lucas that he should get himself to the right place at the appointed time, and, assured that her performance would be recorded, she whipped off her coat to reveal a mink bikini. Or at least, she said it was mink. Lucas later found out it was made of rabbit.
Others could be less self-involved. Lucas’s greatest admiration was perhaps reserved for Gregory Peck, who was not only “the most handsome of all the film stars I ever photographed”, but was so kind that when Lucas’s assistant (or “prop man”), Ernie, was dying, Peck visited him in hospital every day that he was in the UK.
David Niven used to make Lucas laugh. Once, when he stopped by the studio, he told a story about his modelling days, when he and Errol Flynn established a syndicate in order to prevent agencies from taking advantage of them. They would each only model certain body parts, so they had to be paid separately. On one occasion, Niven was due to model a pair of trousers and was asked to hold a drink. “Not my forte, old chap,” he said, “I’m left-handed and feel rather awkward. But I do know just the man for the job.” And there was Flynn, on hand to demand his own fee.
When Jack Buchanan came to be photographed, Lucas had a confession to make. This was 1955, but Lucas had already had a close encounter with Buchanan, in 1938. He was 18, and working as a junior technician in the film processing lab.
He was responsible for Buchanan’s film Brewster’s Millions, each reel of which had to be taken off the processing machine at the critical moment. The room was warm, and Lucas became drowsy. Evidently, he fell asleep, because when he woke up he was covered in celluloid, and large chunks of the movie had to be reshot.

^{Susan Travers with her mother Linden Travers, photographed in 1961}
Whether that persuaded him to keep his eye on the technical side of things from then on, it’s hard to say, but there’s no doubt he became an expert. Lucas worked as a photographer during the war, going on secret night missions with the RAF – none of which he would ever describe to Susan Travers, though he did tell her he once shared a bunk with T E Lawrence.
And when he came to devote himself to portraiture, he “painted with light”, as Travers puts it. Dietrich appreciated straight away that he had identified “the 12 o’clock highlight” she liked so much – the cheekbone-enhancing light from overhead. And even after fashion photographers such as Norman Parkinson in London or Richard Avedon in New York were moving at fast speed with medium-format, he continued to use his 12in x 10in plate camera, a machine the size of a small car.
Lucas pointed out that you could tell how long his sitters had to remain still by observing the amount of ash at the end of their cigarettes.
In 1959, as the studio system was winding down, Lucas set up his own photographic studio in Flood Street, Chelsea. He did more fashion work then, and advertising – but, before long, the Sixties took over, and that era belonged to the likes of David Bailey and Terence Donovan.
It seems odd, perhaps, that Lucas never moved to Hollywood. Travers says he considered it, but when he went to America after the war, he found the portions of food so enormous he couldn’t think of moving there. “I had just come from a country still on terribly strict rationing,” Lucas later recalled, “I found that very offensive.”
In any case, he built a family in Britain. “I spent practically all my life with him,” Travers reflects. The qualities that charmed even his most diva-esque sitters clearly influenced the rest of his life too. “He had a great sense of humour,” she says. “Most arguments ended in laughter.

by: Gaby Wood