Up close and personal

Knightley is one of the latest in the pantheon of famous actors – including ten knights and five dames – to be captured in their dressing rooms by photographer Simon Annand.

“It was the first time she’d ever let a photographer into her dressing room or trailer,” confides Annand, whose work goes on show in Scarborough next week. “She’s very disciplined, very focused and there were loads of expensive cosmetics on her table top.”

In The Half: Photographs of Actors Preparing for the Stage, Annand catches that very private 30 minutes before the curtain goes up. It’s almost reverential: the quiet moment when actors concentrate and transform, generally without the inquisitive lens of a camera. Annand seems to blend in and not disturb and because of his special approach has been allowed into the inner sanctums to record the great and the good for almost 30 years.

“I’m not predatory. I write to people and then turn up,” he says. “It’s a bit like jazz music in the way it develops. I don’t do any research before I meet them and have no preconceptions.”

He has amassed a huge collection of portraits, the most striking in monochrome, first seen in The Dressing Room, which won the best exhibition 2005 at the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. His book, The Half, featuring more than 300 highly distinctive portraits followed in 2008.

According to Dame Judi Dench, Annand is an individualist with an eye for the unusual. “He is one of the most amazing photographers I have had the pleasure of working with in the theatre,” she said. His portrait of her, newly widowed, shows her at the mirror surrounded by cards, her smiling face partially concealed by a picture of Julius Caesar.

“She was in dressing room nine at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, where so many famous actors had looked into that mirror. John Gielgud used to have a flat there in the war. Her husband, Michael Williams, had recently passed away and all the cards indicated the huge support for her. She was doing the James Bond film by day and the play The Royal Family, a 1920s bit of froth at night. Someone like her has so much capacity to make you feel at ease.”

Originally from Reading, Annand was a gardener who swapped digging for the dark room. Self-taught, he says he stole away to a cupboard and learned the essentials of printing. He used to work in the bar at The Lyric, Hammersmith, and says he was intrigued by what was going on in the rest of the theatre. His dressing room portraits began in 1982 with Griff Rhys Jones starring in Charley’s Aunt.

“I took a picture illegally up the fly tower. Griff had to put his head through a window and was very ebullient. Then I thought ‘let’s see what he’s like in the dressing room’. It wasn’t exactly melancholy, but I captured the difference in atmosphere.” Bitten by the bug, he wrote to Jonathan Miller at the Old Vic asking for work and ended up as resident photographer for two years.

“My work is very specific, about a particular situation with a great deal of focus. There’s an intimacy, a closeness and vulnerability. Cate Blanchett let me see that.” He’s not into the usual cliché of artists applying make-up. He looks for the unexpected and captures the essence of his subjects. He always takes pictures by appointment and is rarely turned down. In fact half of theatre land is queuing up to be in his next book.