BEATON, SIR CECIL

born Jan. 14, 1904, London, Eng. died Jan. 18, 1980, Broadchalke, Salisbury, Wiltshire in full Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton photographer known primarily for his portraits of celebrated persons, illustrator, diarist, Academy Award-winning costume and set designer. Beaton's interest in photography began when, as a young boy, he admired the portraits of society women and actresses circulated on picture postcards and in Sunday supplements of newspapers. His nurse taught him camera work and photographic printing, and, when he got his first camera at the age of 11, he imitated those portraits by costuming and posing his sisters. In the 1920s, Beaton became a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue, fashion magazines for which he did most of his work. He continued to develop a style of portraiture in which the sitter became merely one element of an overall decorative pattern dominated by backgrounds specially made of materials such as aluminum foil or papier-mch. The results were alternately exquisite, exotic, or bizarre, but always chic. Many of these portraits are gathered in his photographic books The Book of Beauty, Persona Grata, and It Gives Me Great Pleasure. During World War II, Beaton served in the Ministry of Information, covering the fighting in Africa and the Far East. But the most effective of his wartime photographs are those of the siege of Britain, published in the photographic book Winged Squadrons (1942). After the war Beaton resumed portrait photography, but his style was much less flamboyant. He also broadened his activities, designing costumes and sets for theatre and film. He won Academy Awards for costume design for Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964) and for art direction for My Fair Lady. He published several volumes of his diaries; Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton (Richard Buckle, ed.) was published in 1979. Cecil Beaton: A Biography, by Hugo Vickers, appeared in 1985. Beaton was knighted in 1972.