Terence Stamp, the strikingly handsome British actor who embodied the swinging sixties and whose versatility shone in Billy Budd, Superman and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, died Sunday, his family told The New York Times. He was 87.
They did not specify where he died or the cause, the newspaper said.
Stamp won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his terrifying performance as a psycho who holds a young woman (Samantha Eggar) hostage in William Wyler’s The Collector (1965), then experienced a resurgence when he played the Kryptonian megalomaniac General Zod in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980).
Stamp had supporting roles in Legal Eagles (1986) and Wall Street (1988), then received critical praise for portraying a veteran English crook in the Steven Soderbergh crime drama The Limey (1999). Also that year, he gained Star Wars immortality by playing Chancellor Valorum in The Phantom Menace.
In his youth, the blue-eyed Stamp was widely considered one of the most handsome men onscreen, and Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini used that to peculiar effect in Teorema (1968), casting the actor as a nameless and wordless visitor who seduces an entire household. Pasolini made sure to include several close-up shots of Stamp’s crotch in the film.
As the cavalry sergeant in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), he received equal top billing with Julie Christie despite the fact that Peter Finch and Alan Bates also played characters who romanced her flirtatious Bathsheba. “That was my mum’s favorite movie of mine,” he once said. “She always thought I looked better [in it] than I looked in anything else.”
The feature includes a memorable whirling montage of Stamp, who was naturally left-handed, showing off his swordsmanship to woo Christie on a hillside. Director John Schlesinger insisted that all cavalry men before 1860 were right-handed, and so Stamp obliged.
Offscreen, he romanced Christie, and he claimed both were name-dropped in The Kinks’ 1967 hit song “Waterloo Sunset” — “Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday night” — though the band’s frontman, Ray Davies, denied that in his autobiography.
Stamp also dated English supermodel Jean Shrimpton, and when that relationship ended, he began a round-the-world trip to make sense of it all, stopping first in Egypt and winding up in Bombay. It was there that he received a telegram addressed to “Clarence Stamp,” inviting him to meet Superman director Richard Donner for a chance to star opposite Marlon Brando.
“Two actors of my generations were Brando and [James] Dean,” he told interviewer Michael Parkinson in 1988. “They were the two idols. Dean was no longer with us and Brando was still around, so the idea of getting up on film with him, albeit brief, was irresistible.”
However, working alongside the two-time Oscar winner was disappointing, he said. Brando, playing Superman’s father, Jor-El, didn’t bother to learn his lines, having his dialogue written in a large font on posters placed behind the set lights. “How are you going to play King Lear and Macbeth if you can’t learn a line?” Stamp asked. “I’ve learned them already,” was Brando’s dismissive retort.
Terence Stamp in his first film, ‘Billy Budd.’
Allied Artists Pictures/Photofest
Stamp, then 24, received a supporting actor Oscar nomination in 1963 for his screen debut as the angelic and optimistic HMS Avenger crewman Billy Budd. His captain was played by Peter Ustinov, who directed, co-wrote and produced the film.
Stamp’s confidence in the screen test was shattered when he spied Ustinov looking out over the rooftops as he waited for him. “He was so powerful that everything that I said seemed very thin. And I just stopped speaking,” he said. Ustinov hired him, though, as Stamp had unwittingly replicated Billy Budd’s gormless behavior.
“This is Terence Stamp” the film’s trailer screams, “the young actor hailed by famed columnist Louella Parsons as the screen’s outstanding new star discovery.”
He received the most promising newcomer (male) award at the Golden Globes, and the film was voted one of the year’s 10 best by the National Board of Review.
In a career spanning six decades, perhaps his most challenging performance came after he was offered the role of Bernadette, a transgender woman who embarks on an Australian road trip with two drag queens, in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).
“I thought it was a joke, but a woman friend of mine just happened to be present when I was getting calls from my agent about the script, and she pointed out to me in a very incisive way that my fear was out of all proportion to the possible consequences,” he told the British Film Institute.
“But it wasn’t a fun thing, or anything I was looking forward to. It was, ‘Fuck me, this is the last thing in the world I want to do: be in fucking Australia with paparazzi.’ It was like a nightmare. But it was only when I got there, and got through the fear, that it became one of the great experiences of my whole career. It was probably the most fun thing I’ve ever done.”
The film grossed more than $16 million at the Australian box office, screened at Cannes and won the Oscar for best costume design.
“At the beginning of the film, we’re distracted by the unexpected sight of Terence Stamp in drag,” Roger Ebert wrote, “but Stamp is able to bring a convincing humanity to the character.”
Stamp was born on July 22, 1938, in Stepney, London, the oldest of five children. His father was a tugboat captain who was often away for long stretches.
He won a scholarship to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and later shared a house in London with Michael Caine as the two began their movie careers. When Stamp turned down the film lead in Alfie despite playing the role on Broadway in 1964, Caine snapped it up. (The British acting legends acted on stage in The Long and the Short and the Tall yet never appeared together in a movie.)
Stamp’s spark for acting began, he said, when he saw Beau Geste (1939) in a movie theater.
“The empathy I felt from Gary Cooper was life-changing, and a secret dream was born in the darkened auditorium,” he wrote in his 2017 memoir, The Ocean Fell Into the Drop.
His earlier memoirs were 1987’s Stamp Album, 1988’s Coming Attractions, 1989’s Double Feature and 2011’s Rare Stamps: Reflections on Living, Breathing and Acting. He wrote the 1993 fiction novel The Night and in 2001 co-authored with Elizabeth Buxton a healthy eating manual for those who are wheat and lactose-intolerant called The Stamp Collection Cookbook.
His other films included the spy comedy Modesty Blaise (1966); Ken Loach‘s 1967 debut, Poor Cow; Frank Oz’s Bowfinger (1999); and Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie (2008). More recently, he appeared in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016), Viking Destiny (2018), Murder Mystery (2019) and Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho (2021).
For television, Stamp hosted the first season of the horror anthology series The Hunger, re-entered the Superman world by voicing Jor-El on Smallville and tried to solve the crime at the center of the 2017 Agatha Christie adaptation Crooked House.
On New Year’s Eve in 2002, Stamp, then 64, married 29-year-old pharmacologist Elizabeth O’Rourke, whom he had met in Bondi, Australia. They divorced in 2008.
His late brother, Chris Stamp, was a co-manager and producer for The Who in the band’s earlier days.
In the DVD extras of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Stamp — in character as Bernadette — is asked, “Why is Terence Stamp so attractive?”
“Well, he possesses the three things that any woman would want,” he says. “He’s funny, he’s romantic, and he has wisdom.”
Terence Stamp as General Zod in ‘Superman II.’
Warner Bros./Photofest
