Dean Martin at The Summit, 1960.

Bob Willoughby was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1927 and studied at the University of Southern California and then at the Kahn Art Institute, where the graphic artist Saul Bass was among his teachers.

His career began as an assistant to photographers Wallace Seawell and Paul Hesse, and then moved on to photograph jazz musicians as a freelancer. It was on a freelance basis that he was hired in 1954 to shoot Judy Garland during the making of “A Star Is Born,” one of the first instances of a “special” photographer being brought in to augment the work of studio employees.
Willoughby parlayed that job into a contract with the studio, and went on to contribute photographs to “Harper’s Bazaar,” “Life,” “Look,” “The New York Times,” and “Vogue.” In the coming decades he had more than a hundred and twenty-five motion picture assignments, including “The Man with the Golden Arm” (1955), “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960), “My Fair Lady” (1964), “The Graduate” (1967), “The Lion in Winter” (1968), and “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). He photographed Frank Sinatra frequently, but the star with whom he was most commonly associated in his career was Audrey Hepburn.

In 1964, Willoughby devised a system of brackets to attach a radio-operated 35mm camera to a motion picture camera, enabling him to shoot where other still photographers could not and to achieve stills identical to the motion picture footage.

He eventually made his home in Europe, buying a castle in Ireland (he published his own translations of classic Gaelic verse) and then moving to France. He died in 2009 at the age of eighty-two. 

Biography by Shawn Levy, taken from The Rat Pack.