She must have had a huge confidence to be taking photos of Einstein one minute, singing in a top club the next? “I don’t know if it’s confidence. In Paris, she got a job singing as part of the ensemble at the prestigious dinner club Chez Carrère (apparently the only club the newly married Princess Elizabeth was allowed to visit). She said: ‘No way! I’m going to take a trip to Paris and I’m taking Marilyn with me and you’re going to pay for it’ – which he did.” He told her to go home to her mother while he sorted himself out. “My friend found out her husband was having an affair. He was very serious about it, and he said: ‘Ah yes, now I understand, thank you very much.’” What’s behind the lovely smile in the other picture? “I’d like to think he was smiling at me!” Stafford says.Īt 23, she set off for Europe on the back of another strange story. “Yes, he had asked how many feet per second go through the camera and the director explained to him. In one photo he looks as if he is listening intently. Her photos of the great physicist are wonderful – he’s smiling, crumpled, inquisitive and human. One of Stafford’s pictures of Albert Einstein, 1948. All I was aware of was that I had to focus and click the shutter.” I was just thinking: ‘Oh my God, they’ve given me a camera I’ve never used before!’ I was terrified. “That’s when I was given my first 35mm camera. She had used her parents’ Box Brownie, but nothing more. They invited Stafford to go along with them and asked if she would take his photo. In 1948, two friends were making a documentary about Albert Einstein at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. In New York, she played a few cameos in off-Broadway productions but struggled as an actor. “Maybe he was just making an excuse,” she says. Stafford was so convincing in one role, playing a nasty girl in a Lillian Hellman play, that her boyfriend said she must be innately obnoxious and dumped her. She studied drama at university – paying her way by working at a local defence plant. I think I’m probably the only Stanislavski photographer around.” She giggles. It was so painful to sleep on those things.” But she did like acting, and between the ages of 10 to 18 trained at the Cleveland Play House, alongside Paul Newman and Joel Grey. Did she want to be the next Shirley Temple? “Not me! I hated it. When she was young, her parents hoped she would be the next Shirley Temple and sent her to bed with curling wrappers in her hair. Stafford grew up in a middle-class family – her father a pharmacist who had emigrated from the Baltics as a young boy, her mother a great beauty who dreamed of being a “lady”. These days she is partially sighted, so her daughter, Lina Clarke, is here to help with the technology. Her red lipstick is perfectly coordinated with her red glasses, her hair a magnificent white bob and she looks gorgeous.

She is Zooming from her home in West Sussex. My mother was so vain that she wouldn’t wear a hearing aid, and she said: ‘When I can’t see and can’t hear any more I will kill myself.’ When she couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, she just stopped eating.” Stafford has a habit of telling macabre stories with relish. “She would have gone on more, but she was afraid to have her cataracts done and was going deaf. “My mother said: ‘Probably because the family can’t afford them.’ And I think that was one of my early eye-openers on reality.”īy the way, she says, her mother lived to 103, at which point she died of vanity. She noticed that a girl ahead of her was not wearing shoes, and asked why. So we start in the Great Depression, when she was a little girl walking to the big department store downtown in Cleveland, Ohio, with her mother. Stafford is on the short side (5ft 1in at her peak), glamorous, serious-minded – and a huge amount of fun. The 96-year-old tells me she can’t believe what has happened – not least because she stored her photographs in shoe boxes under her bed for decades and pretty much forgot about them. After the exhibitions dedicated to her fashion and street photography, reportage and portraiture, Brighton Museum is paying tribute to her with a full retrospective. But she has never been celebrated like she is today. The pioneering photographer quietly documented much of the 20th century – slums, celebrities, war zones, world leaders, everything. M arilyn Stafford’s career was hardly unsuccessful.

Cameraman didn t expect to see