Skip to main content

Eva Sereny - An Obituary

Eva Sereny – Photographer, filmmaker

 Born May 19, 1935; died May 25, 2021

 

 Eva Sereny, who has died aged 86, was a self-taught photographer who worked behind the scenes on film sets to capture some of the biggest stars of the 1970s and 1980s. Jane Fonda, Sean Connery, Mia Farrow, Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep were all caught in her lens. Directors similarly framed by her included Francois Truffaut, Werner Herzog and Federico Fellini.

 

While Sereny provided numerous publicity stills, it was her pictures of actors and directors off duty that revealed something more intimate than the professional personas usually presented to the world. Sereny did this by staying unobtrusively in the background, so her subjects were barely aware of her presence.

 

This approach made for some classic shots. A barefoot Paul Newman carries two bottles of beer in each hand while wearing a ‘get really stoned’ t-shirt. Malcolm McDowell smokes a cigarette on the set of Lindsay Anderson’s film, O Lucky Man! (1973). Marlon Brando lights Bernardo Bertolucci’s cigarette while making Last Tango in Paris (1972). 

 

Brando had initially expressed his resistance to photographers, but went on to grant Sereny access not afforded to others. After an initially frosty reception, Raquel Welch did likewise, though Welch never recognised Sereny from their first meeting, and Sereny never let on. 

 

Sereny’s favourite image was one of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Joseph Losey’s film, The Assassination of Trotsky (1972). With Burton playing the title role, Taylor turned up unannounced to see her then husband. The icy look between the soon to be divorced star couple in Sereny’s discretely snapped image speaks volumes. 

 

Also in the film was Austrian actress Romy Schneider. Schneider contacted Sereny a few nights after they met on set requesting a photo session. The result, taken in the small hours, formed the basis of Sereny’s book, Romy in Rome (1998).   

 

Forming such a rapport was typical of the Swiss born photographer. Jacqueline Bisset, who she photographed during filming of Day for Night (1973) wrote a foreword for Through Her Lens: The Stories Behind The Photography Of Eva Sereny (2018), a vital collection of her work. Charlotte Rampling, who was photographed by Sereny on the set of The Night Porter (1974), wrote her a poem.

 

 In one image, Kate Capshaw, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford are captured lounging around on a break from filming Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). As Carrie Kania, director of photography at Iconic Images, observed in Through Her Lens, they look ‘like best friends hanging out in a university dorm’

 

Sereny went on to make her own films. She did this first with The Dress (1984), about a man buying a new outfit for his mistress. The film starred Michael Palin and Phyllis Logan, and won a BAFTA for Best Short Film. Her only feature, Foreign Student (1994) starred Robin Givens and Marco Hofschneider in an adaptation of Philippe Labro’s novel about a football playing French exchange student who falls in love in racially sensitive America. The empathy she brought to all her work reflected her own essence.

 

Eva Sereny was born in Zurich, the only child of Hungarian parents. Aged five, she moved to England with her mother after her businessman father, on a trip there, was unable to return home due to the outbreak of World War Two, and instead arranged for his wife and daughter to be with him.

 

Aged twenty, Sereny moved to Italy, where she met and married engineer Vincio Delleani. She began exploring photography in the 1960s after Delleani had a car accident while the couple and their two young sons were living in Rome. As she told the Guardian in 2018, “It was a close call. I remember sitting beside him in the hospital thinking: My God, but for a few seconds, I would be a widow. I’ve got to do something. I’m quite artistic, though I can’t draw. What about photography?”

 

Delleani set up a dark room in their basement, while a friend who was head of the Italian Olympic committee drafted her in to document a series of new sports centres being built across the country. She flew to London shortly afterwards, and turned up at the offices of the Times newspaper unannounced with her images. Having been granted a meeting, three days later a full page of her photographs was published as a behind the scenes glimpse at Italy’s forthcoming Olympic plans.

 

Her film work began on Catch 22 (1970), with director Mike Nicholls so impressed by her initial submissions he kept her on as a special photographer. She went on to Luchino Visconti’s Thomas Mann adaptation, Death in Venice (1971), and a stream of major motion pictures. Moving into more formally posed portraiture, her work appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine, Newsweek, Vogue, Paris Match, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. 

 

Through Her Lens not only provided a definitive compendium of Sereny’s images. It also showcased a particular era of international cinema. As quoted in the Iconic Images announcement of her passing, when asked how she captured stars in the way she did, Sereny’s reply was simple. “It’s how you approach people,” she said, “life is about that.”

 

She is survived by her husband, Frank Charnock, who she met in 2009; and her two sons, Riccardo and Alessandro, to Vincio Delleani, who pre-deceased her in 2007 after fifty years of marriage.


The Herald, June 3rd, 2021

 

Ends


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL