YORK’S own Dame Judi Dench had just got back from the New York premiere of her last Bond movie, Skyfall, when photographers Jennifer Robertson and Lynne Fletcher went to her Surrey home to photograph her.

You wouldn’t have known she’d been in New York the day before, Jennifer says.

“She bounded down the steps full of energy to meet us, and said, ‘You’ve come a long way, girls, let’s get a cup of tea’.”

Some actors, when they are being directed, like everything to be carefully choreographed. Not Dame Judi. She took her cue from the photographers.

“We went into the garden, and she could see me eyeing up the hammock,” Jennifer says.

“She looked at me as if to say, ‘You want me to get in that hammock, don’t you?’. I said yes, and she jumped in.”

Dame Judi is one of 35 Yorkshire ‘greats’ Jennifer and Lynne have photographed over the past three years, for a new exhibition, Yorkshire Made Me, that opens at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park on March 29. A book of the same name will be published next week.

Other Yorkshiremen and women in the exhibition include David Hockney, the actors Sir Patrick Stewart and Jim Carter (of Downton fame) and the first British woman in space, Helen Sharman.

All are Yorkshire born and bred, and all have gone on to be in some way exceptional in their field – if not globally famous.

They include BAFTA-winning TV writers (Sally Wainwright and Kay Mellor); Olympic gold medallists (Nicola Adams and Hannah Cockcroft); politicians (William Hague); and the first Briton to win a stage of the Tour de France (Brian Robinson, in 1958).

Jennifer, 49, and Lynne, 48, run Halifax-based Kyte Photography, which specialises in portraits of “everyday Yorkshire people”.

The idea for an exhibition celebrating the lives of extraordinary Yorkshire people came one afternoon a few years ago when she and Lynne were driving to a job, says Jennifer. They were listening to an interview with a Yorkshire celebrity on the One On One show on Radio Leeds, and started playing a game: how many well-known Yorkshire people can you think of?

“And then we thought, why not celebrate them in pictures?” Jennifer says.

They made an initial list of 20 people, and started firing off letters. It was to take them three long years to persuade everyone they wanted to take part – and some proved harder to track down than others.

The biggest challenge was David Hockney. They must have written 13 or 14 letters to the artist, Jennifer says – sending them to his homes in California and Yorkshire, and to studios he was associated with.

Then one day the phone rang. “This voice said ‘Hello, Hockney here, yes, I will do it. Come to my home in Bridlington next Wednesday.”

He proved to be a delight, Jennifer says, showing them around his home, inviting them to lunch, smoking incessantly (as he does) throughout. “But he was just so easy to talk to and put at ease.”

Eventually, that initial list of 20 expanded to 35. All but one of the portraits (that of Brian Robinson) are in black and white – but, as the selected photos from the exhibition on our pages today show, they capture powerfully the personalities of the contemporary Yorkshire men and women who truly deserve to be called ‘great’.

• The book Yorkshire Made Me, by Jennifer Robertson and Lynne Fletcher, is published on March 1 by Carnegie, priced £12.99.

• The Yorkshire Made Me exhibition runs in the Garden Gallery at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park from March 29 to June 1.