C S Bull

Clarence Sinclair Bull was born in 1896 and is most noted for his still photographs of hollywood stars in the 1930's and 40's. As head of MGM's Stills Department from 1924 to 1960, he pioneered celebrity portraiture with his alluring, mysteriously-lit images.

Bull was Greta Garbo's favorite photographer and she posed for him almost exclusively for most of her career. His other famous subjects included Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Grace Kelly. He also experimented with early color photography in his stills for "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) and "Gone With the Wind" (1939).

Bull was born in Sun River, Montana. He studied painting with Charles Marion Russell but gravitated to photography in his early 20s. In 1918 he joined Metro Pictures and set up one of the film industry's first in-house portrait studios. Bull published a memoir, "The Faces of Hollywood" (1968). Five of his photographs hang in London's National Portrait Gallery, which held a major retrospective of his work in 1989. he died in 1979.

A short filmography includes:
Lovers? (1927)
The Unknown (1927)
Transatlantic (1931)
Flying High (1931)
Faithless (1932)
The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
Rasputin and the Empress (1932)
The Girl from Missouri (1934)
Mark of the Vampire (1935)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
I Take This Woman (1940)

Elizabeth Taylor