As for the irreverence evident in his work, he adds, it comes from not “putting people on pedestals and shooting them as celebrity gods. I don’t take it all too seriously”. That is perhaps due to the rather unusual way in which Williams entered the world of entertainment photography. Aged six, he remembers a distant relative coming to visit him and his family at home and bringing a load of cameras. “I was immediately interested in the kit,” he recalls. “And then this guy left and later sent me one of his old, nearly broken cameras because he thought I might be interested in photography. I loved it. I was also very dyslexic and, from the age of 11, it was clear that I had a strong interest in photography and was pretty ghastly at most other things. I was either going to join the army or become a photographer, and photography worked out.”

At 19, he and a friend took summer jobs and saved enough to buy tickets to Thailand. He flew out, got smuggled into Myanmar and spent a few weeks living with a guerrilla army that was fighting the government. “We didn’t wait for the phone to ring. I literally just went off and started bullshitting my way into where I needed to get and taking photos,” he laughs. More photojournalism followed in conflict zones in Chechnya and Sierra Leone, though his experiences in the latter led him, at 23, to give up on war photography. “I just thought I was going to die on many occasions,” he says frankly of the experience. “It was absolute hell and I was petrified.” After returning home, he began working on a series of “quite full-on” medical stories for The Sunday Times Magazine, and then was given free rein to choose a new subject. He picked a project celebrating the British film industry and, before he knew it, actors were badgering him to shoot their portraits.

His time on the ground in volatile environments taught him to work quickly and trust his instincts in order to create dynamic, emotive images – lessons he still carries with him today. And as for his advice to young aspiring photographers? “You’ve got to have a point of view now and decide what it is that you do,” he asserts. “There’s no point saying, ‘Here’s my fine art, here’s my landscape, here’s my commercial, here’s my fashion.’ It’s not enough to be ‘a photographer’. You have to do what only you can do.”

Ahead of his book’s publication on 22 June, Williams shares the extraordinary tales behind some of his favourite shots in it, below.