A love affair with film

As the Cannes Film Festival opens, Irish photographer John Minihan retraces the highlights of a career spent capturing some of Hollywood’s biggest names, and his Oscar party trip this year

TO own a villa on top of Beverly Hills, where millionaires’ mansions are as commonplace as trees, is a yardstick of success among the Hollywood film fraternity.

In 1975, I was working for the National Enquirer newspaper. I lived in the Howard Johnson Motel. Wherever I went, I searched for an Irish connection. Working in LA, I was introduced to Michael O’Herlihy at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Michael was a film and television director, best-known for episodes of Hawaii-Five-O, Maverick, and Mission Impossible. Michael was happy to talk about Dublin, where, like me, he was born. He kept in touch with Ireland by buying the Irish papers . Michael died in Dublin in 1997. My relationship with Samuel Beckett brought me into contact with great actors who performed his work: Michael Gambon, for his acclaimed performances in Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape, Sir John Gielgud in the short-film adaptation of Beckett’s play, Catastrophe, directed by David Mamet.