French actress Brigitte Bardot is photographed smoking a cigarette on the set of Les Petroleuses a.k.a. The Legend of Frenchie King in Spain in 1971. Taken as part of a three-part series O'Neill was doing on Bardot, this iconic photograph is widely considered to be one of the most desirable in the O'Neill archive.

“It was a windy day and she was waiting to film a scene,” O’Neill later recalled. “She kept brushing the hair out of her eyes. I thought if I could get a close-up of that moment, it would capture how sexy, strong and wild her image was. The the wind blew and I clicked the shutter. I had no idea if the photo would match the image I had in my mind until the film was developed, which, in the end, took weeks. Even now, remembering the first time I saw these images, I get chills.”

When O’Neill took this photograph, he was already an established professional, having captured many of the biggest names of the 60s. Even so, he would always remember the experience as a personal watershed: the first time an image arrived fully-formed in his mind, which he then realised with his camera.