Audrey Hepburn to Salvador Dalí: Cecil Beaton’s bright young things – in pictures

Self-portrait as King Cnut, circa 1915, London

‘Beaton’s earliest sitters were members of his immediate family, but when he acquired a shutter release for his camera, he would put himself in the picture, a practice he continued for life. As a schoolboy, he wrote: “I don’t want people to know me as I really am, but as I am trying and pretending to be.” His experiments with costume and identity allowed him, time and again, to choose just who that Cecil Beaton might be’