After growing up in post-war London with his mother, Warren attended Terry's Juveniles, a stage school based in the Drury Lane Theatre. It was during this period that he attended auditions through which he received several assignments. One such piece of work was as a child presenter in "The Five O'clock Club", which afforded him the opportunity to associate with individuals such as Marc Bolan (then performing as "Toby Tyler"), who would later employ Warren as his first manager.[2][3]
Warren started his photographic career at the age of 20, when he was acting in Alan Bennett's play Forty Years On with John Gielgud in the West End at the Apollo Theatre.[1] Around this time, Warren bought his first second-hand camera and began to take photographs of his fellow actors. His first major assignment was in 1969 when his friend Mickey Deans asked him to cover his wedding to Judy Garland, which marked the beginning of Warren's work as a professional photographer.[4]
After this decisive event, Warren embarked on his photography career, throughout which he took portraits of personalities including many actors, writers, musicians, politicians and members of the British royal family.[5][6] In the early 1980s Warren embarked on a quest to photograph all 30 British dukes.[7] Together with Angus Montagu, 12th Duke of Manchester he set up the Duke's Trust, a charity for children in need.[8][9][10] Warren has uploaded many pictures from his archive to Wikimedia Commons, and many of those images have been used on Wikipedia pages, including the page on Warren himself.[11]
And yet, there is a third art, the art of Allan Warren. Like every successful venture on this earth, it is the result of compromise or, in other words, the result of thought. Compromise is not necessarily pejorative, since it does not have to be between two evils, or even two different points of view. It may well be between two virtues of divergent character, which is the case here. The posed photograph may not have the vanity of the instant, seized in mid-air, in mid-sentence, in a flash, but it has perhaps even greater psychological insight, since here the subjects reveal not only what they are, but how they would like to be. Their faces make statements, but their expressions are translations of those statements in terms which the poser believes will be instantly understandable. Here, in these photographs, we see not only ourselves as we are, but as we see ourselves, as we wish to be considered, honest, tough, lovable, quizzical, reliable, irresistible, and even within the moderation imposed by our heeding, and our natural desire to conquer, callous, cruel, and delightfully wayward.
— Sir Peter Ustinov about Warren's style of photography in the introduction to Nobs & Nosh – Eating with the Beautiful People, 1974.
In the early 1990s, Warren embarked on writing plays. One of his works, The Lady of Phillimore Walk,[12] was directed by Frank Dunlop and critics went as far as comparing it to Sleuth, a thriller written by Anthony Shaffer. The cast of The Lady of Phillimore Walk consisted of Zena Walker and Philip Lowrie;[13] and saw productions in the United States.[14]
Warren invented the Hankybreathe, a handkerchief which allows the user to inhale air through a carbon filter at the mouth, to filter out the noxious effects of exhaust emissions. The invention, which is meant to be dabbed in eucalyptus oil, harks back to the nosegay and stems from Warren's experience with asthma in heavily polluted London.[15][16][17][18]
Media related to Photographs by Allan Warren at Wikimedia Commons
