Love, Cecil

Cecil Beaton will always be linked to those splendid Hollywood musicals Gigi and My Fair Lady, for which he designed magnificent, Oscar-winning costumes. This vivid and comprehensive documentary of a life well lived displays the full range of Beaton's talents as author, designer, dandy, painter and photographer. Though he claimed he had no talent, the young Beaton's love of photography gave him access to the Bright Young Things of the 1920s, which launched a kaleidoscopic career that's teased out beautifully here by director Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Fame in 30s America followed, with iconic Hollywood portraiture and society spreads, but so did Beaton's controversial fall from grace at American Vogue. Wartime redemption arrived with his photographs of the Blitz, and then a new lease of life from his relationship with the Royal Family (crystallised by his seminal photos of Queen Elizabeth's Coronation in 1953). His relationship with Greta Garbo remains enthralling, while his barbed views on Evelyn Waugh, the Burtons and Katharine Hepburn ("a dried-up boot") show he was no shrinking violet. Contemporaries like Penelope Tree, Leslie Caron and Davids Hockney and Bailey ("he was a snob but a great photographer") give good anecdote and nestle nicely alongside the use of Beaton's photographic back catalogue. Meanwhile, erudite, frank excerpts from his many diaries (narrated by Rupert Everett) paint a portrait of an artist whose work still stands as a grand chronicle of 20th-century cultural history.