Shooting for the Stars: Across four decades, photographer Richard McLaren has captured everyone from Halle Berry and Heath Ledger to The Rolling Stones and Van Halen … then there was that time he met Nelson Mandela …

By MICHAEL AUSHENKER | Contributing Writer

There was the time he crossed paths with a pre-007 Pierce Brosnan on a Croatian movie set. He convinced a hydrophobic Tina Turner to pose in the middle of her infinity pool. He was also there the moment David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers reunited in 2006 for the first time since disbanding after their classic 1984 album. Some photographers have shot a celebrity or three and called it a storied career. Since age 18, Richard McLaren, a longtime resident of the Palisades, has been capturing a galaxy’s worth of stars, across the generations.

Now, for the first time, he is opening his vaults exclusively to the Palisadian-Post as he prepares to sell some limited editions of his work.

Past shoots include working with The Rolling Stones, Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, Pamela Anderson, Rachel Weisz, Orlando Bloom, and the late actors Patrick Swayze and Heath Ledger.

And many of his iconic images have traveled worldwide to lodge in the public’s collective memory. It is how we remember some of our stars.

The son of a bookie and a homemaker, McLaren became the only professional artist to emerge from his working-class, South London family.

His other brothers are a pilot, a restaurateur and an optician—and maybe a lot more respectable, he teases.

“I stumbled into this business straight out of school,” he said, thanks to a connection through his cousin, a British tabloid newspaper art director.

After finishing England’s equivalent of high school, McLaren joined Scope Features photographic agency, initially as an assistant.

As a photographer, McLaren cut his teeth on his first celebrity photo call: Danny Kaye, in England promoting 1976 TV adaptations of “Peter Pan” and “Pinocchio.”

As a freelance commercial photographer, McLaren traveled all over Europe.

“It was just great fun,” he remembered. “We got to meet the models. You’re having lunch with Jaws.”

McLaren does not mean Bruce the shark.

During the making of the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me,” “[Richard Kiel] shook my hand,” McLaren recalled, smiling. “It was like five shovels shaking your hand.”

McLaren’s resulting celebrity images were disseminated to top magazines worldwide: Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Hello.

While he didn’t shoot any of the images, McLaren got to hang out with Bob Marley during a photo session.

“He had a joint this big,” McLaren said, gesturing wide. “He passed it to the photographer.

“A really nice, down to earth guy.”

Also down-to-earth: the late Phil Lynott, whose Irish rock band Thin Lizzy he photographed at Bray Studios, where many Hammer horror movies were filmed.

Through the 1980s, McLaren photographed everyone from Sarah Jessica Parker to Canadian comic Leslie Neilsen in London to promote a “Naked Gun” movie.

“I shot him pulling his coat over his head,” McLaren said of Neilsen, who was easy to improvise with. “You just point the camera and let him do this thing.”

Perhaps surprisingly, McLaren said he’s never really had any negative experiences with prima donna celebrities … not even on his Miami shoot with J-Lo, who some have depicted as a diva.

“They’re going to give you 110 percent,” McLaren said. “They may turn up with a hangover but even then they still give you 90 percent.”

Particularly dramatic: Being in the room the moment vintage Van Halen (sans bassist Michael Anthony) reunited.

It was the first time Eddie and Alex Van Halen had decided to perform again with David Lee Roth in 21 years.  “The guys were great,” he said. “I got a great picture with [Eddie]; with his guitar with the cigarette burns.”

As a precursor to his move to Los Angeles from England, McLaren often rented a Beverly Hills house for photo shoots, including sessions with Mike Tyson and Tommy Chong.

“The kids were young so we can travel,” he said of his two daughters, now 25 and 22 and both Manhattanites. As they got older, McLaren decided he was done with London.

“We went to New York, it was fantastic,” he recalled, but said to himself, “If I am going to move, let’s move where there’s some ocean, they can have some fun.”

In 2000, he relocated to a Mandeville Canyon home.

“It was just sheer luck,” McLaren recalled. “Very country like. The kids went to school in the Palisades.”

He soon moved to a Paseo Miramar home and 10 years ago he moved to another part of Pacific Palisades.

He loves it here.

“It’s safe,” he said. “People are pleasant. It’s very family-oriented. It needs more restaurants but hopefully Rick Caruso will change that.”

Getting celebrities to trust him has been the key to his success.

“Anyone can take a picture but when you’re in front of celebrities, you have to make them feel comfortable,” McLaren said. “They know my reputation.”

It’s that reputation that has posited him within Sharon Stone’s new Malibu home for a lifestyle shoot; taking risqué shots of Halle Berry for FHM circa 2000’s “X-Men;” shooting Gwyneth Paltrow back when she and Brad Pitt were an item; placed him on a Santa Monica roof top in 2003 with Heath Ledger for a GQ Australia shoot.

Most amazingly, he convinced a water-fearing Tina Turner to pose in the middle of the pool at her France villa.

For the iconographic shot an assistant stood out of sight behind Turner and steadied her in the azure pool she never used. It is an image that still amazes today.

He has been very hands on.

Joaquin Phoenix, the famously independent and occasionally odd actor, ejected all the hair and makeup staff employed to pretty him up for a photo session.

Phoenix, the bad guy in “Gladiator,” then insisted that the photographer help him “do” his hair himself.

So, for five hours, as the hapless makeup people buzzed around outside the studio, banned by the actor from entering, the unlikely duo created photographic magic.

And then there was a cut Jean-Claude Van Damme who he persuaded to strip completely naked and pose holding baby lion cubs inside a South Africa hotel suite.

“Van Damme was very professional, even when he was only wearing a sock, but the cubs ripped up the furniture,” McLaren said, laughing.

McLaren was covering supermodel Linda Evangelista in 1987 when she was a judge at an Emirates Airlines-sponsored Miss World contest.

While staying at Sun International Hotels, McLaren chatted up a table of friends, one of whom knew Nelson Mandela’s right-hand man. He begged shamelessly for a few minutes with the president.

It might have seemed merely hopeful, yet two days later, McLaren found himself in the Elephant Room, where the history-making South African leader read his morning newspapers.

“It’s just classic,” McLaren said. “It’s him having a cup of tea in his favorite room in the presidential palace and me just being a fly on the wall.”

Staring at the image again inside the Village Starbucks where this interview was conducted, McLaren added. “It just brings back a lot of memories. Mother Teresa, Gandhi and him, there’s no three bigger people.”

McLaren, a Canon camera loyalist, didn’t mind having to cross the digital divide from celluloid. In the film days, he used to lug around 28 cases when he traveled—18 cases of cameras, 10 cases of lighting. Now he just ports a couple of cases.

Digital makes his entire process easier and faster.

The downside? “It’s brought more people into the business who can’t shoot pictures. With film, you have to be a talent because you didn’t know what you had until you got it back from the lab.”

Currently, McLaren shoots print ad photography for such clients as the BBC, Emirates Airlines and NASCAR. He has produced a critically acclaimed book of land and rural portraits called “China: The New Long March.”

A few weeks back, he snapped Bo Derek.

Given McLaren’s abundance of riches in A-list neighbors, the Steven Spielbergs, Tom Hankses and Ben Afflecks of the community don’t have to lose sleep at night fearing McLaren is lurking in their topiary. McLaren is no paparazzo nor did he ever aspire to become a long lens-armed bounty hunter.

They’re a whole other species of photographer, he said.

“I don’t want to be pushing and shoving and intruding on people’s lives, that’s not me,” he said.

McLaren is surprisingly liberal about the way writers and artists—including photographers—have found their intellectual property poached from the worldwide web.

“I find my images all over the internet,” McLaren said.

There’s no point trying to stop the hemorrhaging: “You don’t get anywhere. They’ll just close the company down. You’re paying $20,000 to get into court. You’re not taking anyone to court. You’ve got no one to go against because the company’s gone.”

Years ago, while shooting Swayze dancing inside Pinewood Studios, a member of the paparazzi beat him to the punch.

“He was shooting over my shoulder,” McLaren recalled. “It wound up in the paper. I hadn’t even processed it for the Italian magazine.”

The magazine’s editor thought McLaren had purposely leaked the image.

“Paparazzi can be a hindrance if you’re doing something exclusive. But it could be good promotion as well,” said McLaren, who does allow that today’s selfie-driven celebrity culture has undercut his business.

“Now they do their own [pics]. All the exclusives they post themselves. Timberlake posted his baby the other day. [They do it] because they can control it.”

It’s simple math.

“Kim Kardashian has 50 million followers. She has more followers than the magazine’s sales. She can control it.”

Yet having established himself in the pre-internet age, McLaren continues to trade professionally on long-established goodwill with old acquaintances such as Mick Jagger.

He still loves what he does, “meeting all sorts of people; doing a celebrity shoot one day and then a shoot for UNICEF in India the next day.”

Or, as he did on one trip, literally stumble from supermodel to civil rights icon.

“I can meet Mandela,” he said, still smiling. “And, like my journey from London to the Palisades, that is as amazing as it gets.”

To learn more about Richard McLaren and purchase his prints, visit richardmclarenphoto.com