There are really three leads, not two, in the 1957 film classic Funny Face—Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, and Richard Avedon. Though credited simply as “special visual consultant,” Avedon provided inspiration for Astaire’s pointedly named Dick Avery, a taskmaster fashion photographer who turns the awkward bookshop duckling Audrey Hepburn into an haute-couture swan. Oh, and the opening title sequence? Designed by the same slight, handsome powerhouse out of the Bronx who toyed with the idea of becoming a film director and—as the exhibition “Richard Avedon: Hollywood” at Gagosian Beverly Hills makes clear—always stayed close, with and without his camera, to the star power generated in Hollywood. In portraits for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, Judy Garland, Meryl Streep, and Cher are stripped of their silver-screen wardrobes and backgrounds, lit instead by their own force fields and Avedon’s obdurate yet intimate gaze. Bringing the whole shebang full circle, Ron Howard’s new documentary, Avedon, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, starts streaming November 11 on Netflix. —Celia McGee