THE MORNING AFTER

Faye Dunaway, Terry O’Neill and one of Hollywood’s most famous photographs

It is early morning on March 29, 1977.

The Academy Awards ended only a few hours earlier. Faye Dunaway has just won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Network, and while most of Hollywood is probably still asleep, she is sitting alone beside the pool at The Beverly Hills Hotel.

At her feet are the morning newspapers, already carrying the news of her victory. A breakfast tray sits beside her. On the table, almost casually, is the Oscar.

And behind the camera is Terry O’Neill.

The photograph they created that morning would become one of the defining images of Hollywood. Nearly fifty years later, it has lost none of its power. In the 2024 documentary FAYE, the image appears right at the beginning and is described as “the most famous shot in Hollywood history.”

It is easy to see why.

There is glamour, of course. The Beverly Hills Hotel, the silk robe, the swimming pool, the Oscar. But there is something else in the photograph too. Faye is not celebrating. She is looking away, somewhere between exhaustion, disbelief and contemplation.

The party is over.

Now comes the morning after.

Terry had planned it before she even won

Terry O’Neill had met Faye a few weeks earlier and the two had quickly become friends. She was already considered a favourite to win the Academy Award for Network, and Terry had been asked to photograph the winner.

But he had no interest in making the photograph everyone else would make.

As Terry later remembered:

“I didn’t want to take the expected photo; the one with the actor holding the award, moments after, with a stunned expression. I wanted to capture something different.”

So he made Faye a proposition.

If she won, she would meet him beside the pool at The Beverly Hills Hotel first thing the following morning.

Somehow, she agreed.

And she won.

After only a few hours of sleep, Faye arrived at the hotel at dawn. Terry persuaded the staff to give them access to the pool before the other guests appeared. He gathered the morning newspapers and scattered them around her feet, their headlines announcing what had happened only hours before.

Faye placed the Oscar on the table.

Terry started shooting.

What he wanted was not the moment of victory, but what came afterwards.

“I always wanted to capture what it felt like the next day.”

He wanted the moment when everything finally sank in. When an actor woke up and realised that something fundamental had changed overnight. The roles, the money, the expectations, the attention. Life before the Oscar and life after it.

Or, as Terry put it:

“This is that moment of realisation.”

But there wasn’t just one photograph

Today we know The Morning After as a single iconic frame. But Terry did not take one photograph and leave.

There was an entire sequence.

And this is where the story becomes even more interesting.

Terry later said:

“The other shots are just as interesting.”

During the session he asked Faye to move around the table. She stood up. She reclined in the chair. Terry widened the frame to include the palm trees and more of the poolside setting. At one point she changed out of the silk robe and into a sharp white suit.

Frame by frame, the mood changes.

In some photographs Faye appears distant and almost lost in thought. In others she is more relaxed. Some show more of the unmistakable Beverly Hills surroundings. Others bring us closer to her.

Seen together, the outtakes feel almost like a short film from that morning.

The famous image may have become the one that entered photographic history, but the surrounding frames allow us to stay in that moment a little longer.

And that feels particularly relevant today.

The classic co-signed edition of The Morning After, signed by both Terry O’Neill and Faye Dunaway, is sold out, while lifetime signed examples have become increasingly difficult to find. But several of the photographs Terry made around that famous frame were subsequently released as limited-edition fine art prints.

Among them are FD010, FD013, FD046 and FD049, each offering a slightly different view of the morning that produced one of Hollywood’s best-known photographs.

They are not reproductions of the famous image, nor are they lesser versions of it.

They are other moments from the same story.

An image that keeps finding a new audience

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Faye Dunaway photograph is how little it seems to age.

For decades, collectors who remembered Dunaway from Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Network and the great films of 1960s and 70s Hollywood were naturally drawn to it. For many, she was one of the defining actresses of their generation.

But today we see something else.

Younger clients are often just as drawn to the image, sometimes before they even know the full story behind it.

Perhaps it is the composition. Perhaps the fashion. Perhaps it is the strange mixture of success and solitude that feels surprisingly contemporary.

Or perhaps it is simply what happens when a photograph becomes bigger than the person, the film or even the moment it originally documented.

The best photographs have a way of doing that.

They begin as one moment in time and somehow continue to speak to people who were not there, who remember none of it, and who may not even have been born when the shutter was released.

Almost fifty years after Terry O’Neill met Faye Dunaway beside a swimming pool at dawn, we are still looking.

And perhaps that is the real measure of an iconic photograph.