Celebrity photographer Cecil Beaton was the first celebrity snapper, 30 years after his death he continues to influence fasion photography

It's seen as a relatively new phenomenon, but manipulating celebrity portraits to flatter the sitter was a technique used heavily by the acclaimed photographer Cecil Beaton, one of the pioneers of the approach.

Monday marks 30 years since the death of photography's "randy dandy", an acerbic, catty man who photographed and mingled with everyone who mattered for much of the 20th century, and avoided those who didn't at all costs.

Born in 1904, Beaton got his first camera aged 11 and persuaded his sisters Baba and Nancy to pose for him, sending the images in to local newspapers. By adulthood he was getting to know all the right people, falling in with the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and photographing them. His charm and wit helped him to make contacts quickly and by the 1930s he became famous for his society portraits, which he trimmed, whittled and tweaked in the dark room, slimming waists, refining jaws and smoothing skin tone, turning galumphing duchesses into true society beauties.

A fellow photographer, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, said of Beaton: "He thought nothing of slicing inches off a sitter's waist if he thought it would please and lead to other commissions. He told me he had realised at the very beginning that this was the way to make the grade … he was a very good photographer but he was always too keen to flatter and please."

His father was a successful timber merchant and as such he enjoyed a privileged upbringing, growing up with servants and attending Harrow then Cambridge. However he was painfully aware of his status as a member of the nouveau riche and was desperate for acceptance from the upper classes, an acceptance that became official when he was awarded a knighthood in 1972.

From solid middle class stock, but keen to gain access to the aristocracy, it was his artistic sycophancy in endlessly flattering his sitters that endeared him to the upper classes, and at the peak of his career he was entertaining his close friend, the Queen Mother – one of his biggest challenges in the airbrushing department – at his home.

• An employee of the Chris Beetles gallery poses with a photographic portrait of Marilyn Monroe by photographer Cecil Beaton

As part of a PR campaign to assign some glamour to the royal family in the wake of the abdication (Wallis Simpson was a fashion icon and the royals, by comparison, were seen as decidedly dowdy) he was called in to photograph the new Queen, later Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

She was matronly and frumpy at a time when waspish waists, flat chests and high glamour were all the rage. However, through a combination of inspired styling and camera trickery, Beaton managed to make the Queen look glamorous and even a little pretty. From that moment, every socialite and celebrity wanted to sit for him, and by the 1930s he was made.

He photographed everyone who was anyone in British society as well as artists, authors, fashion designers and celebrities. In the 1950s he was photographing the world's most famous women, from Audrey Hepburn to Ingrid Bergman, even having an affair with Greta Garbo. His most famous portraits include shots of Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Grace Kelly and Salvador Dali.

• Fashion designer Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel with photographer Cecil Beaton, circa 1930s.

By most accounts, Beaton was not a particularly happy person. He was famous for biting the many well- manicured hands that fed him, including members of the royal family, and he did not hold back when it came to chronicling his encounters with the rich and powerful in his diaries.

Indeed, as George Weidenfeld said, "he would happily have witnessed their execution as long as he was given a good enough seat".

Elizabeth Taylor, "a great thick revolting mass of femininity" is described at one particular ball as having "her breasts, hanging and huge, like those of a peasant woman suckling her young in Peru". The writer Truman Capote, a friend of Beaton's ravaged by drink and drugs "really does seem to have gone round the bend in a very unattractive way". Capote in turn described Beaton as "a total self-creation".

When Marilyn Monroe turned up more than an hour late for a shoot with him, Beaton was unimpressed. He wrote of the event: "She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps on the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a daisy as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited, infectiously gay performance. It will probably end in tears." It ended in one of Beaton's most famous shots.

And Beaton's acid tongue was not reserved for celebrities. The royals felt its razor-sharp edge, too. Princess Anne was "a bossy, unattractive, galumphing girl," while Princess Margaret wore her hair "scraped back like a seaside landlady". Wallis Simpson was a friend of Beaton's, but following her husband's death was no longer of use.

"What will happen to her is of no interest," he said, without a trace of sentiment. "She should live at the Ritz, deaf and a bit gaga."

• Prtrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton, wearing a dress designed by Hardy Amies for the State Visit to Germany in 1965.

Even his closest confidants were not spared. Stephen Tennant, the eccentric aesthete and Beaton's friend and mentor, who introduced the social climber into high society, became something of a hermit in his old age and Beaton unsympathetically described him thus: "Stephen, like a beached whale, was in bed, fatter than ever, his red-dyed hair down his back, his fingernails two inches long, his beard sprouting through make-up".

However, Beaton may have reserved the worst of his vitriol for the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who bullied him when the two attended Harrow, sticking pins into him on his first day of school. Waugh sat for him for a portrait, yet the two despised each other. "Waugh is my enemy," said Beaton. "We dislike one another intensely. He thinks I'm a nasty piece of goods and oh, brother! do I feel the same way about him."

It is a bizarre parallel that where Beaton's portraits sought to flatter, his diaries were so utterly scathing, cruelly detailing his subjects' physical imperfections.

It is easy for Beaton's eccentric personality to overshadow his work. He was, after all, something of a caricature. However, his contribution to photography cannot be overstated. Many of today's most prolific and celebrated fashion photographers have acknowledged the debt that they owe to Beaton.

Mario Testino says: "He marked his period as if he were the only photographer around." Nick Knight praises his work "for its grace and elegance. From the touching and funny pictures of his sisters and the delicately fragile poses of his photographs of society beauties, as if they were made of porcelain, to the memorable wartime images, he was always sensitive and poetic."

Beaton had a very distinctive style that is parodied to this day. When Victoria Beckham landed a spread in Vogue last year, the images the magazine used had a distinctly Beaton-esque air, giving the footballer's wife a somewhat aristocratic edge.

He was utterly transfixed by glamour, yet he was more than just a fashion photographer. One of Beaton's most celebrated images is of three-year-old Eileen Dunne, sitting in her hospital bed clutching her teddy bear.

He had been given the task by the Ministry of Information of recording images from the home front during the Second World War and the little girl was a casualty of the blitz. The image, taken in 1940, became one of the defining shots of the war. He also received critical acclaim for his images of elderly people, warts and all, and a world away from the airbrushed heiresses he is more famous for shooting.

He was also more than just a photographer. A celebrated diarist, he had six volumes of his acerbic observations published, spanning the years from 1922-1974. He became an expert on the history of fashion, and persuaded the V&A to mount the world's first major fashion exhibition, using his extensive contacts to borrow pieces which went on to become the foundations for the London museum's permanent collection.

He worked for both British and American Vogue, photographing the world's beautiful people and writing reports on fashion shows and other events. Later in his career, he designed theatre sets, costumes and lighting for a 1946 Broadway production of the Oscar Wilde comedy Lady Windermere's Fan, in which he also acted.

In 1956 he worked on the costume designs for the first stage version of My Fair Lady, going on to dress Audrey Hepburn for the 1964 film version, for which he won an Oscar. He was truly a multi-talented man, and was widely liked, despite his liking for catty remarks.

His friends ranged from film stars to politicians, all of whom dined at his Wiltshire home over a 50-year period during which he not only photographed society's movers and shakers but did more than his fair share of moving and shaking himself.

Looking at Beaton's images showing everyone at their best angle, painstakingly altered to heighten their beauty to inaccurate proportions purely to flatter the sitter, it is difficult to reconcile these with the remarks he penned in his diaries about the people in front of his lens.

There is a bitterness, an unpleasantness that's hard to swallow, bringing us to that eternal question of whether we must separate the artist from the art. In Beaton's case, we can only gaze upon his work with appreciation, acknowledge his massive contribution to photography and, as one critic put it, "count ourselves lucky for never having met him".

This article first appeared in The Scotsman, 16 January, 2010