Even in the gloom of March, breakfast is glamorous. It's something to do with the glassiness of sleep, the decadence of pausing to eat, while in a rush. By the swimming pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel though, in silk and heels, breakfast is sublime. It's the very early morning after Oscar night, March 1977, and Faye Dunaway is just waking up after winning an Academy Award for her role in Network. The photographer, Terry O'Neill, had met her on a magazine shoot the week before and they had become friends. He tells her his idea. "I wanted to capture the look of dazed confusion," he recalls today, "to capture that state of utter shock that Oscar winners enter, where they go to bed thrilled, then overnight, it dawns on them that they've changed, that they've just become a star. And not just a star, a millionaire."

Last year, O'Neill, 71, began overhauling his archives and in the process discovered hundreds of lost prints, including shots of Richard Burton in the bath, Raquel Welch dropping her knickers, David Niven in pants and sock suspenders, and a sleeping Brigitte Bardot. He describes the discovery of these hidden portraits as "a pleasure and a relief". In this, one of his best-known photographs, Dunaway is having the Beverly Hills Hotel breakfast, unusual for its inclusion of English tea. The ceramic pot glints in the centre of the frame, right where, in a traditional award-winner's photo, the Oscar should be. Everything in the picture tells a story – the early morning light, the newspaper headlines, Dunaway's glazed, faraway look. "She's reached the top of the tree," chuckles O'Neill, who would marry Dunaway six years after the picture was taken, and divorce her three years after that.

"She isn't sure quite who she is any more. I waited for her to look away from the camera, and I got the shot. I look at this picture often, and I'm still so proud of it. It's still the best Oscar picture ever taken. And modern photographers should take that as a challenge." OFM