'Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do," said Picasso. "Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out."

With his dentist-friendly Daz-white teeth, Terry O'Neill is more than satisfied with his life's work as a photographer -- perhaps one of the world's most iconic. He is a cockney lad made good who went on to immortalise in photographic image everyone from Frank Sinatra (whom he befriended for 30 years) to Faye Dunaway (whom he married in the mid-Eighties) to Muhammad Ali (whom he hung out with for hours on several occasions).

But Terry O'Neill never wanted to be a painter. He never even wanted to a photographer.

"I wasn't interested in bloody photography! I hate bloody cameras! I hate them! It all comes in the way of what I do. It is difficult to explain looking back on it all now, but the camera, yes, is the thing that takes the picture really. It is my mind that takes the picture in the way that I see it. The camera actually gets in the way. It limits you."

He was born in the East End of London but was, he laughs, "conceived in Dingle". He adds with a cockney chirrup that it was "on the bay, my mum told me".

His mum was Josephine Gallagher, from Waterford. She met and married a Cork fella by the name of Leonard O'Neill who was working for Ford Motors in the Second City. They moved to Dagenham in England where their son was born on July 30, 1938.

"So now I'm an Irish cockney without the accent," he laughs. "I'd love to have an Irish accent."

His accent has a touch of the Michael Caines about it. "My father was really Irish," he adds. "I don't think he ever took to living in England. He hated going into London. My mother used to love bringing me to the shows in London. But my mother was very refined and from a good family. She was a fabulous mother. They are both dead now ... about 20 odd years ago," says Terry who has a sister, Angela.

He is in Ireland to personally launch Intimate, a must-see collection of his artwork in Kildare Village. It is fascinating to have lunch with a man who met and photographed Elvis at Vegas in the early Seventies. It is almost more fascinating because, without pausing for breath, he can casually add: "And then I went out with his wife. What happened was..."

You soon discover that lots of Terry O'Neill's stories start with "what happened was..."

"I was in Beverly Hills, and I was at a loose end. I met this girl who worked in a shop and it turned out to be her because he had left her by then," the cockney Irishman says, referring to Priscilla Presley.

"So I used to go around to take her home and all that and spend the night and whatever. And the phone would go. And it was Elvis. I picked it up. He never asked me who I was or anything. Then she would go off and be an hour on the phone and come back like nothing had happened. It was weird. She was very shy."

Terry O'Neill is anything but shy. But he's funny with it. When the soup and sandwiches we had ordered in Ely wine bar in Ely Place in Dublin still haven't arrived after 35 minutes, he warmly asks the manageress: "Are you testing us to see how long we can go without digesting food?"

Five minutes later one of the world's most famous photographers -- his most recent job was photographing Bill Clinton -- is happily munching through his ham and marmalade sambo. He is a bit of a jazz buff and asks the manageress the name of the CD they are playing. He used to listen to Louis Armstrong's Ain't Misbehavin' in his bedroom as a kid growing up in Heston in West London suburbia. He had a little drum kit and used to bash away to it.

Terry left school at 14 and joined a jazz band as a drummer. He did his national service and got at a job at Heathrow (which was just up the road from Heston) as an airport photographer.

He says he really wanted to be a flight attendant so he could get to America to play jazz. Jazz's loss was photography's gain: one day, by chance, Terry photographed a sleeping man in a waiting room at the airport. When the snoozing figure turned out to be the British foreign secretary at the time, the Daily Sketch bought the picture and offered the young urchin a job.

"I did it all on luck actually," Terry says modestly. "I was suddenly the youngest photographer in Fleet Street at 22. I didn't even drink until I was 24. I was Mr Pure. When The Beatles were doing their drugs, I was not taking part," he says.

All the bands like The Stones and The Who -- to say nothing of Sir Laurence Olivier (whom Terry photographed in a dress) and Marianne Faithfull (whom he photographed looking like an angel in stockings and suspenders in 1964) took to him from the off. He clearly had a charm -- charm that is still very much evident today.

In 1967, Ava Gardner, whom Terry met on the set of Lady In Cement in London, wrote a letter of introduction for him to her boyfriend, Mr Frank Sinatra. When he showed the letter to Ol' Blue Eyes a few months later in Florida, his reaction sealed a friendship that would last more than three decades: "Buddy, you're with me."

Indeed Terry, who has photographed just about everybody worth photographing, says his all-time favourite picture is of Sinatra walking along the boardwalk with all his heavies on Miami Beach in 1968.

"It was the first time I met him," Terry recalls. "He was a one-off, Sinatra, and he had his troubled side but he was a man who if this building was burning down he would find a way to get everyone out. We talked about music, mainly. He had an incredible life."

You didn't do too badly yourself, Terry. "When I look back, I've had an incredible life, yes," he says, sipping his espresso in Ely.

He knew Terence Donovan, the English photographer who hanged himself in his study in London in November 1996. O'Neill also knew, to a lesser degree, Irish photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, who threw himself under a train in March 2006 in London.

"I knew Terence. He walked from his office and had plenty of time to think about it. It was really sad. It was not like Bob's [suicide] where he walked in front of the train. Terence was on a mixture of tablets and it screwed up his metabolism. I remember meeting him at a show in Hamilton's Gallery and we went upstairs and had a drink and he said to me: 'Is this all there is?'

"I could sense then that he didn't see the good of people coming to see the show. He saw the darkness. He didn't see the good side."

Terry's first wife was actress Vera Day, known as Britain's Marilyn Monroe. It didn't last. "I got married too young," he says. "I really regret it because she was a great girl. To this day, I regret that it is over -- but what can you do?

"I've got two kids with her. I was just travelling so much. I was going to America for three months at a time, because I was doing really well in Hollywood. I was sad about that. And it didn't work out with Faye," he says, referring to Faye Dunaway whom he married in 1983 and divorced three years later.

Faye was the subject of one of perhaps his famous pictures, sitting in silk dressing gown by a hotel pool in Bel Air in 1977

the morning after winning her academy award for Network. "She had only had three hours sleep," Terry recalls.

He married a third time, this time to the former model agency head Laraine Ashton. "I'm happily married now, but it is not really a job to be married in, photography, you have to dedicate too much time."

You could have been a wedding photographer, Terry.

"I'd hate that," he laughs. "I hate bloody cameras! I'm not kidding. I don't even take a camera on holidays."

Yet that bloody camera of yours made so many people immortal -- Bardot, Ali, Jagger, Raquel Welch, Sophia Loren, Ali.

"And the pictures made me immortal in a way too," smiles the Irish cockney.

Terry O'Neill: Intimate, a free exhibition, will run at Kildare Village until mid-January 2010. For info on the exhibition or directions on how to get there visit www.kildarevillage.com

- Barry Egan

Sunday Independent