Sid Avery, a top celebrity photographer in the 1950s and ’60s whose signature pictures depicting the “everyday” lives of Hollywood stars appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look and other national magazines, died of cancer July 1 at a Los Angeles hospital (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). He was 83 .
He focused his lens on a grinning Marlon Brando enjoying toast and coffee at the breakfast table and later captured the brooding actor with his bongo drums in his living room.
He shot a glistening Rock Hudson, freshly showered and with a towel wrapped around his waist, talking on the phone.
And he captured Elizabeth Taylor sitting in a folding chair on location in Texas for “Giant,” eyes closed and face sensuously tilted upward.
Last year, Mr. Avery came out of retirement to shoot the star-studded cast of the remake of “Ocean’s Eleven.” After all, he had shot Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack pals during the making of the original film.
Most of Mr. Avery’s images of Hollywood stars are now 40 to 50 years old, Barenholtz said, but they’ve lost none of their allure.
Mr. Avery’s infatuation with photography began at age 7 when his uncle, a landscape and architectural photographer, took him into his darkroom.
“He put a piece of paper in a tray and suddenly, magically, an image appeared,” Avery told the Chicago Tribune.
By 1938, he was shooting celebrities for Silver Screen, Photoplay and other magazines. In 1939 he opened a studio.
During World War II, Mr. Avery served in the Army Signal Corps and helped establish the Army Pictorial Service laboratories in London and Paris. The labs processed all combat still and motion picture footage from the European theater of operations.
After the war, he returned to Hollywood and took on commercial assignments as well as doing his celebrity shoots for national magazines.
In the early 1960s, he switched to advertising photography and later that decade opened a successful television commercial production company.
In the 1980s, Mr. Avery founded the non-profit Hollywood Photographers Archive to preserve, document and exhibit the work of notable photographers.
Mr. Avery is survived by his wife, Diana, three children and three grandchildren.
