Shooting Star

Andy Gotts has photographed hundreds of famous faces, and it all began in King’s Lynn, the Sheringham photographer tells EMMA-LILY PENDLETON.

- Emma-Lily Pendleton

“NOBODY EVER believes me when I say I’m just a Norfolk boy,” says photographer 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. This isn’t a portfolio you’d believe began in King’s Lynn, with a portrait of Stephen Fry.

At 45 and 26 years into his career, Andy Gotts has photographed hundreds of film and television stars - “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” - from Robert DeNiro to Clint Eastwood; George Clooney to Lauren Bacall; Keira Knightley to Daniel Radcliffe. He is best known for his magnum opus 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. And as he 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 any photoshoot, 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...”