A photograph of Alec Guinness in the character of Fagin, taking a break with a cigarette during filming of David Lean’s Oliver Twist 60 years ago, is among a treasure trove of unpublished photographs from the heyday of British cinema that has been unearthed.

More than 5,000 historic images, dating from the 1930s to the 1970s, have been discovered in a vault at Pinewood Studios, Buckinghamshire. Two battered old metal filing cabinets, which had remained unopened for as long as anyone can remember, were found to be wedged full of images.

Some of the photographs are so early, they are still on glass plates. Others appear on strips of negatives.

There are shots of the biggest stars of the era, including Dirk Bogarde, who found matinee-idol fame as heart-throb medical student Simon Sparrow in the Doctor films and critical acclaim as an actor in classics such as The Servant.

The unpublished photographs show him sharing a joke with Brigitte Bardot with whom he starred in Doctor at Sea in 1955. There are also previously unseen images of a handsome Bogarde relaxing with a cigarette in his dressing-room in the late 1950s and bespectacled – filming Esther Waters in 1947 – with a block by his shoe to fix his position at a time when cameras could not move with ease.

The discovery – which also includes images of Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, Kenneth More and Lean, among many other actors and directors – was made by Morris Bright, while researching Pinewood Studios: 70 Years of Fabulous Film-making, a lavish 384-page book on the history of the studio which is published this week.

Speaking to The Times yesterday, he recalled that the images had not been catalogued and most bore numbers that did not appear to correspond to anything.

“The old filing cabinets didn’t look as if they’d been opened for 30 or 40 years,” he said “People had walked past them for years. They were just two battered old cabinets. I thought I’d seen it all, having written books over ten years. But to stumble across such pictures for the first time is incredible.” He will publish a large number of the photographs for the first time in his book, which has a foreword by the Oscar-winning actress Dame Judi Dench, a former Pinewood Studios actress.

She writes in the book: “Such images have been painstakingly researched to bring us more than just the usual shots of our favourite films and it is these behind-the-scenes images that really captivate.”

Other unpublished images show Trevor Howard – who made his name as the romantic lead in Lean’s Brief Encounter in 1945 – messing about with the beautiful French actress Anouk Aimée, showing her the finer points of cricket during a break in filming Golden Salamander in 1949.

Directors also feature prominently in the archive. Alfred Hitchcock, master of the thriller genre, was caught unawares while in a music recording session for Frenzy, his first British film in two decades, made at Pinewood in 1971.

On being shown the photographs of Hitchcock and Bogarde, John Russell Taylor, the film historian, said: “I have never seen any of these images before. The Hitchcock one is particularly interesting because it’s quite rare to have him caught off-guard and looking like a person, rather than playing Alfred Hitchcock, which is what he usually did.”

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