The newspaper photographer Sally Soames has died at the age of 82. Speaking on Saturday to the Observer, the newspaper that gave Soames her first assignment, her only child, Trevor, said she had died that morning at her home in north London, surrounded by her family and after a long period of illness.

“We are all very upset. She was a beautiful woman,” he said.

Many of Soames’s frank and engaging solo portraits of famous people, including well-known shots of Rudolf Nureyev, Chris Eubank, Iris Murdoch and Hilary Mantel, are now held in galleries and collections around the world. The National Portrait Gallery in London has 17 of her images.

Hilary Mantel by Sally Soames, 1992. Photograph: Sally Soames

Soames once said that her photographic hero was Anthony Armstrong Jones, who, like her, preferred to take pictures in black and white using natural light. She was self-taught behind the lens, but later received some formal training from the Guardian picture editor, John Pilkington, when she took her first job on the paper. But it was a prize-winning picture of a youth in Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve 1960 that landed Soames her first assignment on the Observer in 1963.

The photographer later worked for the New York Times, Newsweek and the Sunday Times, joining the staff in 1968 and remaining there until 2000. Early retirement was forced upon her by physical difficulties which, according to her son, were brought on by years of carrying heavy camera equipment and struggling to get a good view of the events she covered.

“She was very petite and she was always trying to get an unusual angle, from down on the floor or something, and eventually her body gave in. And of course her retirement also coincided with the arrival of colour film. She refused to take colour pictures,” he said.

Photographer Sally Soames in Israel in 1991 following a scud missile attack by Iraq. Photograph: Colin Davey/Getty Images

Born in London as Sally Winkleman, the photographer was an aunt to the Strictly Come Dancing presenter Claudia Winkleman.

Among her other key portraits are studies of Margaret Thatcher, Seamus Heaney and Tony Blair, the latter taken during the 2001 election campaign. Her arresting image of Andy Warhol was photographed through a pane of glass.

Soames’s books of portraits include Manpower (1987) and Writers (1995) and she prided herself on the research she carried out, often exchanging letters before meeting her subjects. “I used to talk to them,” she once said. “Nowadays you don’t have the time with people – everything’s changed and PR people are timing you; it’s a nightmare.”

Giorgio Armani by Sally Soames, November 1985. Photograph: Sally Soames

Soames also told how, later in her career, she was scheduled just three-and-a-half minutes to photograph Sean Connery in a luxury hotel. She spent two of those minutes talking to him.

A pioneering woman in a male field, when Soames arrived to photograph Cassius Clay in 1966, before he became Muhammad Ali, the boxer said he had never met a female photographer before.

Soames gifted the bulk of her work to the Guardian Media Group’s Scott Trust Foundation. She said she believed that she was at her best when she started because she was “fearless”. “In latter years I was more professional, a bit institutionalised,” she argued.