Sitting Pretty

“Nobody ever believes me when I say I’m just a Norfolk boy,” says Andy Gotts. Take one look at his celebrity portrait-filled website and it’s easy to see why. It views like a who’s who of Hollywood, featuring hundreds of famous faces. It isn’t, in short, a portfolio you’d believe began in King’s Lynn, with a portrait of Stephen Fry. But that’s just what happened, as Gotts explains here…

- Emma-Lily Pendleton

I made a wish list of 100 actors at the start of my career that I wanted to meet and I’d met them all within six years of starting out.

At 45 and 26 years into his career, Andy Gotts has photographed hundreds of film and television stars. And that’s no accident – it is, in fact, exactly what he set out to do. “I made a wish list of 100 actors at the start of my career that I wanted to meet and I’d met them all within six years of starting out,” he explains. These include everyone from Robert De Niro to Clint Eastwood; George Clooney to Lauren Bacall; Keira Knightley to Daniel Radcliffe. He is best known for his photobook, Degrees – a collection of 300 black-and-white portraits of celebrities and figures in the public eye – and has been awarded an MBE for his contributions to photography.

As Gotts prepares to complete a near decade-long project cataloguing yet more stars of film, music and fashion, in a fundraising collaboration with Sir Elton John, he pauses to reflect on a journey that started in Sheringham.

“I try to get famous people to act in a way you never see in pictures,” he explains. “Whenever I do a photo shoot, I always do an internet search  beforehand. Everyone has a ‘photo face’ and you have to break them; the pretend laugh, the looking down with a hand in the hair… ”

Whether it’s Scarlett Johansson pulling funny faces (“she was really drunk,” he laughs) or Sidney Poitier with tears rolling down his cheeks as he recounts the story of his birth, Gotts has an uncanny ability to break down boundaries. “You treat them as you would a friend,” he says, simply.