Terry O'Neill, Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, 1972

Terry O’Neill
Paul Newman and Lee Marvin
On the set of the film 'Pocket Money', Tucson, Arizona, 1972
Lifetime Edition gelatin silver print
16 x 12 inches

In Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, Terry O’Neill distils the weight, poise, and magnetism of two of Hollywood’s most distinctive screen presences into a single frame. The photograph is less about posing than about presence—the unspoken dialogue between two men whose identities were forged not through polish, but through character, lived experience, and an unmanufactured self-assurance.

O’Neill understood how to photograph actors between roles—when the camera isn’t documenting a performance, but the residue of one. Here, there is no theatrical gesture, no attempt to play to the lens. Instead, there is a quiet charge of confidence, humour, and self-awareness that sits in the body language. The casual posture, the minimal movement, the understated wardrobe—everything speaks to a particular register of star power that did not need to announce itself. It simply existed.

The photograph reads as a portrait of two careers at altitude—artists who have already earned their place in cultural memory, yet carry themselves as if nothing needed to be proven. O’Neill isolates that delicate balance: the lightness of two men who know exactly who they are, and the gravity of two careers that shaped the image of American masculinity in cinema for decades.

This is O’Neill at his finest—capturing not the moment that happens in the frame, but the moment just beneath it: the quiet, real, unguarded humanity of two individuals who helped define the language of film, cool, and character for the rest of the century.