Photographer N. Parkinson

Norman Parkinson, who specialized in photographing women as stylish as himself and won fame for his pictures of his friends, the British royals, died Thursday in Singapore at age 76.

The 6-foot, 5-inch sophisticate with an engaging sense of humor collapsed on Feb. 2 with a brain hemorrhage in his hotel room in Sabah, Malaysia. He had been working in the Malaysian jungle with American model Debra Harris for the U.S. magazine Town and Country.

He was flown to Singapore’s Mt. Elizabeth Hospital, accompanied by his friend Mohamed Al Fayed, one of the Egyptian brothers who own Harrods department store in London.

Among his best known portraits are those of Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth II, for Anne’s 21st birthday in 1971, and the queen’s mother, Elizabeth, on her 80th birthday in 1980.

Parkinson said when he photographed the queen he found her a nervous and difficult sitter. He once described the queen’s mother and Princess Anne as “the most royal of all the royals.”

Friends and the many models he photographed for Vogue magazine and other glossy publications around the world knew him as “Parks.”

Twiggy, the pencil-thin model who became one of his favorites, described her old friend as “one of the great eccentrics of the photographic world.”

The son of a lawyer who was educated at London’s Westminster School, his skill with a camera won him a clientele that included empresses, movie stars, top models and pop stars as well as the royals.

Over the years he captured on film such a diverse array of stars as Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn, the Beatles, Katharine Hepburn, Elton John, Noel Coward, Mick Jagger and Greta Garbo.

His glamorous models included Wenda Rogerson, who he married in 1945.

Parkinson’s “snaps,” as he called his photographs, were exhibited at the state-funded National Portrait Gallery in London and featured in several best-selling publications, including “Sisters Under the Skin.”

He was honored with a one-man show at Sotheby’s in New York in 1983, and a sampling of his work was published that year as “Fifty Years of Style and Fashion.”

An eccentric dresser who sported a military-style mustache, he listed his hobbies as sun worshiping, bird-watching, breeding racehorses and pig farming.

Parkinson recently had started selling his own brand of pork sausages to top London stores such as Harrods and Fortnum and Mason.

In its obituary Thursday, the British newspaper, The Guardian, noted dryly that “there might be a little difficulty about interment, for as he once observed: ‘I have a few foolish ideas, and one of these is that I could never bear to be buried with people to whom I had not been introduced. . . .’ ”