He was interested in music and won a piano scholarship, studying at the Trinity College of Music in London. But he decided he would never play well enough to make it his career, and with his family background, acting seemed the obvious alternative. He joined the repertory theatre in Bromley and his handsome looks began to win him small parts in films. In 1952, the American director Bernard Vorhaus gave him a break in a film called Fanciulle di Lusso (The Finishing School), which was shot in Rome. It was his first and last star part, but he persevered on the fringes of the British cinema acquiring friendships and connections that later helped establish him as a photographer.
His first published picture appeared in Women’s Own magazine in 1958 and showed Stirling Moss’s wife, Kate, watching the race in which her husband won the British Grand Prix. Freelance commissions followed and Ward began to work regularly for the Evening Standard’s show-business pages. He joined the Sunday Times in 1965 and stayed with the paper until he retired 30 years later. He once calculated that he had covered 5,500 assignments including photographing Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Sting, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier, Gary Cooper, Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher and Harold Wilson. He broadened his range to include news stories such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Aberfan Disaster in south Wales and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
Ward’s abiding enthusiasms included elegant cars and powerful motorbikes. He owned several Rolls-Royces and taught his editor, Harold Evans, the best way to ride a BMW. These were expensive hobbies to sustain on a staff photographer’s salary, but Ward had a carefree approach to money. He was often in love and was married at 19 to a professor of music and a further three times until finally in 1976, he married his fifth wife the actor and dancer Elizabeth Seal. He died in 2011.
Buy his limited edition photographs from mainstream galleries here.
