THERE was a time in Hollywood, during the 1940s and 1950s, when the making of a good glamour portrait could do as much for an actor’s reputation as a good movie.

These were the days before heat and other specialist humiliation magazines, before stars suffered the indignities of being snapped unpainted and unprepared. Instead this was the era of Hollywood myth and magic, of radiant hallucinations and film stars who were at once human and superhuman, figures whom the watching millions could both identify with and worship. In Britain it was Cornel Lucas, working with the Rank Organisation and later at his Pinewood Pool Studio, who was making the most persuasively “magical” portraits. His first major star session was with Marlene Dietrich in 1948, and the results, as can be seen in the new Cornel Lucas exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, show his considerable poise and character, at the age of 25, in dealing with this most notoriously difficult subject.

There was little that Dietrich did not know about photographic printing, let alone lighting and composition, and she wasted no time in small talk with this young photographer.

Lucas lit her from several angles, etching the sharp lines of her cheekbones and illuminating the ice-hard perfection of her face. Her favourite lighting was from above (the “12 o’clock highlight”) and the great skill was to achieve a balance between intense lighting and the meltdown of hair and make-up. Lucas clearly got it right first time.

Dietrich used to study the rough proofs at length through a four-inch magnifying glass and mark changes in black pencil. The following day she summoned Lucas with the prints and marked them with Xs for removal, and Os for retouching. In a way she used her photographers as plastic surgeons. Of course, she did not really look like this portrait, but it is a persuasive image of the actress, even if rather less than reassuring about the woman.

Lucas went on to become one of her few trusted portraitists. She introduced him to many more of his subjects and in subsequent years he photographed dozens of stars including Dirk Bogarde, Katharine Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot, as well as Diana Dors posing energetically in a mink bikini in a gondola. When he left Pinewood in 1959, the studio system of stars under contract was coming to an end. He set up as an independent and continued making portraits right up to the late 1990s. Steven Spielberg, photographed in 1998, is the most-recent portrait in the show, but it is too contrived for a “natural” shot.

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