Terence Stamp, an incredibly handsome British actor who embodied the shaking of the 60s and whose versatility shines in Billy Bad, passed away on Sunday in the adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. He was 87 years old.
They did not determine where he died or the cause, the newspaper said.
Stamp won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his horrifying performance as a psycho in William Wyler’s Collector (1965) hostage.
Stamp supported the roles in the Legal Eagles (1986) and Wall Street (1988), and received critical acclaim for portraying a veteran English con man in the Stephen Soderbergh crime drama “Rymee (1999).” Also that year he won the immortality of Star Wars by playing Prime Minister Valorum in the Phantom Menace.
In adolescence, the blue-eyed stamp was considered one of the most handsome men on screen, and Italian director Pia Paolo Pasolini used it for a distinctive effect in Theorema (1968), casting the actor as an unknown, unspeakable visitor who seduced the whole family. Pasolini made sure to include some close-up shots of the stamp’s crotch in the film.
As a cavalry sergeant (1967) far from the crowds of Madding, he received equal charges with Julie Christie despite the fact that Peter Finch and Alan Bates also played characters who romanticized her flirty Bathsheva. “That was my mother’s favorite movie,” he once said. “She always thought she looked better (of course) than I’d seen more than anything else.”
This feature includes a montage of stamps of naturally left-handed, memorable swirling montages, showing off the swordsman to seduce Christie on the hillside. Director John Schlesinger argued that before 1860 all cavalry men were right-handed and stamps were mandatory.
Off-screen, he romanticized Christie, claiming that he both dropped his name on the Kinks’ 1967 hit “Waterloo Sunset.”
Stamp also dated English supermodel Jean Silipton, and when the relationship ended, he began traveling around the world to understand it all, first stopping in Egypt and being rolled up in Bombay. He received a telegram addressed to “Clarence Stamp,” and invited Superman director Richard Donner to meet up with him and ask for a chance to appear on the other side of Marlon Brando.
“The two actors of my generation were Brando and (James) Dean,” he told interviewer Michael Parkinson in 1988.
But it was a shame to work with the Oscar two-time winner, he said. Brand, who plays Superman’s father, Joroel, did not mind learning his lines by writing his dialogue on the large font on a poster placed behind the set lights. “How do you play King Lear and Macbeth if you can’t learn the line?” Stamp asked. “I’ve already learned them,” said the brand’s boring retort.
Terrence stamps on his first film, “Billy Budd.”
Allied Artists Pictures/Photofest
The 24-year-old Stamp was then nominated for the Oscar for his support actor for his screen debut in 1963 as the optimistic HMS Avenger Crewman Billy Budd at Angelic. His captain was played by Peter Ustinov, who directed, co-written and produced the film.
Stamp’s confidence in the screen test was shattered as Ustinov looked over the rooftop while he waited for him. “He was very powerful and everything I said looked very thin, and I stopped talking,” he said. However, Ustinov hired him, as Stamp unconsciously recreates Billy Budd’s gormless behavior.
“This is Terence Stamp,” cried the film trailer. “The young actor welcomed famous columnist LulaParsons as the outstanding new star discovery on the screen.”
He won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer (Male) Award, and the film was named one of the 10 bests of the year by the National Jury Board.
In a career spanning 60 years, perhaps his most challenging performance came after he was offered the role of Bernadette, a trans woman embarking on an Australian road trip with two Drag Queens in the Adventures of Priscilla in the Desert Queen (1994).
“I thought it was a joke, but when my female friend happened to be receiving a call from my agent about the script, he happened to point out to me in a very sharp way that my fears were not proportional to the possible outcome,” he told the British Film Institute.
“But it wasn’t fun. It was a nightmare, but only when I got there it was one of the great experiences of my entire career.
The film won over $16 million at the Australian box office, was screened at Cannes and won an Oscar for its best costume design.
“At the beginning of the film, we are distracted by the unexpected sight of Terence Stamps on drugs,” writes Roger Ebert.
Stamp was born on July 22, 1938 in Stepney, London, the oldest of five children. His father was the captain of tugs and was often apart for a long time.
He won a scholarship at the Weber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, and later shared his London home with Michael Caine. Kane snapped it when Stamp turned down the film’s lead with Alfie despite playing a role on Broadway in 1964. (The British acting legend never appeared together in the film, but for a long time he was taller and taller.)
The sparks of Stamp’s acting began when he saw Beau Jeste (1939) in the cinema, he said.
“The empathy I felt from Gary Cooper is life-changing, and secret dreams were born in a dark auditorium,” he wrote in his 2017 memoir that the sea falls.
His previous memoirs were about the 1987 stamp album, the 1988 Coming Attraction, the 1989 double feature, and the 2011 rare stamps, reflectance, breathing and acting. He wrote the 1993 fiction novel The Night, and in 2001 he co-authored a Healthy Dietary Manual for Wheat and Lactose intolerance called the Stamp Collection Cookbook.
His other films included the humble Blaze (1966) of spy comedy. Ken Roach’s 1967 debut, poor cow. Frank Oz’s Bowfinger (1999); Brian Singer’s Valkyrie (2008). Most recently he appeared in Miss Peregrine’s Singular Children (2016), Viking Destiny (2018), Murder Mystery (2019), and Edgar Wright’s Last Night’s SoHo (2021).
On TV, Stamp hosted the first season of the horror anthology series The Hunger, re-entering Superman World with Jor-El aloud at Smallville, attempting to solve crimes at the heart of the 2017 Agatha Christie Adaptation Crooked House.
On the Great Ve Day of 2002, 64-year-old Stamp married 29-year-old pharmacologist Elizabeth O’Rourke, whom he met in Bondi, Australia. They divorced in 2008.
His late brother, Chris Stamp, was the band’s former co-manager and producer.
In the DVD extras of Queen of the Desert, Priscilla, we are asked: “Why are Terrence Stamps so attractive?”
“Well, he has three things any woman wants,” he says. “He’s weird, he’s romantic and he’s clever.”
Terence Stamp as ZOD General in “Superman II.”
Warner Bros. Photofest
