Terence Stamp (1938–2025)

Terence Stamp, the film actor who has died aged 87, was once described as “the most beautiful man in the world”.

Propelled to fame in the early Sixties by films such as Billy Budd and The Collector, Stamp seemed to be Britain’s answer to Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford. He fell in with a group of glamorous folk including Mick Jagger, David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton, whose photographs did much to sell magazines throughout the decade.

His brief romance with Julie Christie gave the Kinks their lines about “Terry and Julie” in Waterloo Sunset. He opened a fashionable canteen, Trencherman, in Chelsea with the photographer Terence Donovan, serving nursery food. And above all he had become, with the supermodel Jean Shrimpton, part of the most beautiful – and photographed – couple in London.

“A lot of ‘em are gone…the old faces,” Terence Stamp’s Wilson says flatly an hour into Steven Soderbergh’s exquisite neo-noir “The Limey,” with a twinge of sadness he doesn’t allow himself to let breathe.

Wilson has come from England after a nine-year stretch for petty crime. An escape followed by an escape. Stamp knew what this was like; he specialized in rebirth. He’d go away and come back once and again.

When he arrived, he dazzled all, seeming to hoard awards and nominations, but it never seemed to faze him.

Like so many of his characters, he was created off-screen with a searing interiority; born standing with a zen-like command of his emotions. You could say Wilson was the part he was born to play, but that would be a white lie.

He was born to be exactly who he was, and every character that found him. The pictures were born for him to play. He was a movie star, and he was an actor. But maybe more than that, he was a perfectly inscrutable face.

Stamp’s childhood was a happy one, given the circumstances. He was born in 1938 in the once aristocratic hamlet of Stepney. He spent the most time with his loving mother as she gave him four more siblings by their literally remote father. He was a sailor, a stoker filling steamship furnaces with coal between stints in the merchant navy.

When they weren’t dodging bombs during the Blitz as a child, he and his mother would go to the pictures. He remembered truly coming alive when, 23 minutes into William Wellman’s picaresque “Beau Geste,” a strapping Gary Cooper bounds down the stairs of an English manor and grabs an axe from a decorative suit of armour. He’s playful, but, as the film progresses, he shows his quality as a man, and of course, an actor who transcends whatever trappings in which he’s been placed.

He was accepted into the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and after graduation, he started acting in plays, meeting future roommate Michael Caine in a production of Willis Hall’s The Long, the Short and the Tall, about a lost patrol in Malaysia during the Second World War.

His first film was Peter Glenville’s “Term of Trial” with a reserved Laurence Olivier as his foil, a stern teacher. Peter Ustinov’s adaptation of “Billy Budd” followed, where he makes a meal of quiet logic and churning doubts.

He was nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta, won a Golden Globe, and inspired a Paul Weller song. His place in screen history was secure.

Stamp’s reluctance to fame meant he cut something of a Billy Budd-like figure himself for the next decade, an interloping innocent in a nest of vipers.

Stamp next starred in William Wyler’s “The Collector,” where he plays a quiet and sensitive psychopath, bent by virginity and child-like shyness, who collects butterflies and kidnaps Samantha Eggar to cure his loneliness.

Equally wedged between eras and sensibilities was John Schlesinger’s “Far from the Madding Crowd,” in which Stamp plays Sergeant Troy to then-girlfriend Julie Christie’s Bathsheba. The film’s best scene is his.

Ken Loach’s debut feature “Poor Cow” was Stamp’s following picture stripping away the artifice of his last few pictures and allowing himself a shot at the “angry young man” school of edged simplicity.

Stamp moved to Italy in the late ‘60s (he was offered “Blow-Up” and Bond) and was cast by two of the country’s biggest directors. Pier Paolo Pasolini cast him in the scintillating “Teorema,” in which he seduces every member of an upper-class family, causing them all to implode.

In Federico Fellini’s “Toby Damnit,” a segment of the omnibus “Spirits of the Dead,” he plays himself in all but name. He’s an actor who has made a deal with Satan, pursued by paparazzi.

The only thing that brought him back was a telegram asking if he wanted to make a movie with Marlon Brando. The movie hardly mattered, but it happened to be “Superman”.

Stamp’s presence in “Superman” and “Superman II” is his best remembered by most moviegoers, imbuing General Zod with sadistic gravity.

In 1984, Stamp entered his next act. He appears as a very modern devil in Neil Jordan’s adaptation “The Company of Wolves.”

“The Hit” remains one of Stephen Frears’ best films, a lightly existential yet still bloody and neurotic crime film. Stamp plays a criminal who turned in his accomplices and now lives like a reclusive artist in Spain. He rejoins his old world when two hitmen (Tim Roth and John Hurt) show up to retrieve him.

The parts changed Stamp from a lead into an eccentric, philsophizing support pillar in films as diverse as the sci-fi phenomenon “Alien Nation,” “Bliss,” and “Wall Street”.

In a departure from anything he had ever done before, Stamp dragged up for Stephan Elliott’s 1994 cult comedy classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), playing Bernadette Bassenger, a trans woman and performer who joins two drag queens on a road trip across the Australian outback – with lines such as: “I’ll join this conversation on the proviso that we stop bitching about people, talking about wigs, dresses, bust sizes, penises, drugs, night clubs, and bloody Abba!”

His by-then weathered face and whiskeyed voice give Bernadette’s sorrow truth and dimension.

Stamp’s fan base was considerably added to with an appearance, albeit a short one, in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) as Chancellor Valorum. In 2008, he played one of the conspirators planning to assassinate Hitler in Valkyrie, which starred Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, each actor using his own accent. Stamp also provided the voice of Jor-El, aka Superman’s dad, in 19 episodes of the TV series Smallville from 2003 to 2011.

In Song for Marion (2012), a sweet-natured, if modestly conceived comedy-drama about a choir of sixtysomethings, he played the curmudgeonly Arthur, persuaded to join in the singing by his terminally ill wife Marion (Vanessa Redgrave).

1999’s “The Limey”, a film in which he plays a British gangster headed to Los Angeles for the first time to find out who killed his daughter. He is transfixing in his anger. You believe that he can take men half his age in a fight, his guilt having made him into an instrument of destruction.

Terence Stamp remained unmarried until 2002, when he took as his wife Elizabeth O’Rourke, some 30 years his junior; the marriage was dissolved in 2008.

In later life he lived an almost ascetic existence in his rooms at Albany in Piccadilly. He travelled by bus (with a bus pass), spent little on food and nothing on clothes. “Everything I have is made-to-measure,” he said, “it will last longer than I will, besides I’m middle-aged and past all that now.”