The National Portrait Gallery received almost 1,500 entries for the prize this year and the three judges, Louise Doyle, director, National Portrait Gallery, Joanna Gilmour, curator at the gallery and guest judge, Blair French, director of Artspace Sydney, selected the final 46 portraits in this year’s exhibition.

In a departure from previous years, when the subjects were almost always “unknowns”, this year’s exhibition vies with the Archibald Prize in its list of arts celebrity subjects that includes gallery director Edmund Capon, actor John Bell, artist Jeffrey Smart, the late artist Margaret Olley and journalist Richard Neville.

Even so, according to Doyle, “in portraiture, there’s always a balance between the portrait and the back story”.

McNicol’s winning portrait is not of a star, but rather an actor with what McNicol calls “a very colourful life but very tough life”.

Flanked by Charles, who praised the artist’s role in his emergence from that tough life, he talked of the actor’s substance-abuse periods in jail and his triumph over that, to the point where he is now is flourishing in his art.

As for the $25,000, “for an art photographer, the money always goes straight back into the work”.

The full list of finalists is available at http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/nppp.php

The 2012 National Photographic Portrait Prize, at the National Portrait Gallery until May 20. The exhibition will later tour to Moree Plains Gallery, NSW, the Glass House Gallery, Port Macquarie NSW, Flinders University Art Museum and City Gallery, SA and Griffith Regional Art Gallery, NSW. Entry is free to all venues.