Terence Donovan's wife: 'Terry worked with the world's most beautiful women. I just had to pray Lisa Armstrong speaks to Diana Donovan, wife of the late fashion photographer Terence Donovan, about his famous subjects. What, in the words of the great Kylie, makes a photograph so catchy you can't get it out of your head, even decades after it was taken? Fifteen years after Terence Donovan's unexpected death in 1997 his pictures still snag the eye and elicit smiles - as these, and the ones featured in the Saturday Telegraph Magazine last weekend testify. He was a brilliant technician, certainly, but there is more to it than that. His wife Diana (Di Di as he called her and as all her friends continue to) says he just adored his subjects, whether they were Jean Shrimpton, Naomi Campbell, Maggie Thatcher or Diana, Princess of Wales, who commissioned him to do her official tour portraits. READ: The fashion photographs of Terence Donovan Some famous photographers can be slightly predatory, or detached, or just plain creepy. That doesn't mean they don't produce memorable work - even the creeps, I'm afraid. "But Terry was very avuncular," says Di Di. He could get grouchy but he never cowed the models. You can see that ease in their eyes. He may have talked straight rather than lasciviously to the supers trooping in and out of his studio, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a challenge being married to him. Every day, working with some of the world's most beautiful women? In the end, all I could do was pray," says Di Di. It seems to have worked. Theirs was a successful marriage of opposites - him a Zen Buddhist and the East End son of a lorry driver, her the middle-class daughter of a businessman living the colonial life in Guiana. She was also a Catholic. No, her parents weren't thrilled initially, but once they met Donovan they, too, succumbed to his charm. In any case, it all happened rather quickly. Di Di had informed him there was no future in their relationship, so he wrote her a letter one weekend informing her he'd booked the register office for the following Thursday. He'd also booked himself a gig shooting a party political portrait for the Conservatives. The bride wore a grey high-necked silk midi-dress and black tights for the wedding. The groom had to zoom off before coffee to finish the shoot. "It was fine," she says. It's not as if he hadn't warned me. She first met him around 1964 when she was working as the picture editor on a magazine edited by David Puttnam. The features editor was the late Mark Boxer. Somehow this duo had persuaded Donovan to shoot for them, even though they had no budget, not even enough to pay models, so the magazine staff had to pose in the rainwear. They met again years later and had dinner. He drove her home. Not her home, his home. She politely got out of his Bentley and caught a bus back. Di Di is deadpan about her years in the vortex of fashion. Was I in the vortex? I think I missed out on the really good bits of the Sixties. But being in the orbit of Bailey, Donovan and Duffy must have been like something out of Blow-Up, surely. Seems not. By the time Terry and I finally hooked up it was the end of the decade. Donovan, Duffy and Bailey were going their separate ways. For Bailey and Donovan that meant increasingly working on TV and billboard commercials. Donovan revered his wife, from her Received Pronunciation and delicate looks to the way she brought up their children, Daisy, the TV presenter and Dan, the musician, to also speak RP. She's kept the lithe looks - lots of gym and trekking plus a wardrobe of classics from Joseph and the occasional show stopper from her beloved Saint Laurent. But I wonder what it is like being keeper of the flame for someone whose work helped define another time. She was barely 50 when he died, aged 55, and has never remarried. A new book, Terence Donovan Fashion, which she has co-edited, was six years in the sorting. All that immersion in the past could be bad for the soul, but in the end, she says, paraphrasing what her saltier husband would say when people asked him about the Sixties, "it's not the damn Sixties. It's now.