1960s icon who was the ‘master of the brooding silence’

Terence Stamp’s dashing beauty and smouldering glare made him a star of Sixties cinema.

One of many stalwarts of Swinging London, the working class actor’s first movie earned him an Oscar nomination.

With actress Julie Christie or supermodel Jean Shrimpton on his arm, he specialised in enjoying refined villains: together with Superman’s arch nemesis, Common Zod, and the petulant Sergeant Troy in Far From the Madding Crowd.

The Guardian known as him the “grasp of the brooding silence”, however Stamp’s performing proved to have vary in addition to depth.

Thirty years after his profession started, he shocked his followers – however picked up a Golden Globe nomination – as transgender lady Bernadette Bassenger in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Terence Henry Stamp was born in Stepney, east London, on 22 July 1938. He died aged 87 on 17 August, his household mentioned.

His father, a person Stamp as soon as described as “emotionally closed down”, was a ship’s stoker and infrequently away from residence.

Younger Terence’s curiosity in performing started to blossom when his mom took him to the native cinema to see Gary Cooper in Beau Geste, a movie that left a deep impression on him.

After enduring the Blitz within the east finish of London, the Stamp household moved to the extra genteel Plaistow – the place Terence attended grammar faculty earlier than getting the primary of a collection of jobs in promoting companies.

In his autobiography, Stamp Album, he recalled how he liked the life, however he couldn’t shake off the sensation he needed to be an actor.

Having been turned down for Nationwide Service due to issues together with his toes, he received a scholarship to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Artwork – which removed his cockney accent.

After finishing his research, he set out on the grinding native repertory circuit that was the coaching floor for all aspiring actors within the Nineteen Fifties.

On one event, he discovered himself in a touring manufacturing of The Lengthy and the Brief and the Tall alongside one other budding actor named Michael Caine, with whom he would later share a flat.

Stamp’s leap to stardom got here when he was solid within the title position of a 1962 movie, Billy Budd, primarily based on the Herman Melville novella.

His efficiency because the naïve younger seaman, hanged for killing an officer in self-defence, received him an Academy Award nomination for Greatest Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe for Greatest Newcomer.

In the identical yr, he appeared in Time period of Trial alongside Laurence Olivier.

Stamp was hailed as one of many new wave of actors from working-class backgrounds, comparable to Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, who had been additionally making a reputation for themselves.

In 1965, Stamp starred in an adaptation of the John Fowles novel The Collector, because the repressed Frederick Clegg who kidnaps a lady and imprisons her in his cellar.

By now, he was frequently seen on the most trendy Sixties gatherings, and his beauty introduced him loads of feminine consideration.

There was a relationship with the actress Julie Christie, whom he’d approached after seeing her holding a gun on {a magazine} cowl in 1962.

The affair solely lasted a yr, however was regarded as later immortalised by the Kinks within the music Waterloo Sundown: with a line referencing Terry and Julie crossing over the river.

He turned down the possibility to star in Alfie, having performed the half on stage. His flatmate, Michael Caine, took the position as an alternative and it launched his profession.

In 1966, Stamp appeared as Willie Garvin – a tough Cockney diamond – within the movie model of Peter O’Donnell’s cartoon, Modesty Blaise.

And, a yr later, he starred as a bank-robber-with-a-soft-heart in Ken Loach’s kitchen sink drama, Poor Cow.

Stamp discovered Loach tough. The director, he felt, was too political and hid the script from the solid – preferring to feed them strains whereas taking pictures every scene.

“Earlier than a take, he’d say one thing to (co-star Carol White),” he complained, “after which he would say one thing to me, and we solely found as soon as the digital camera was rolling that he’d given us fully totally different instructions.

That is why he wanted two cameras, as a result of he wanted the confusion and the spontaneity.”

He was reunited with Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd.

He was courting Jean Shrimpton by then, however their on-screen chemistry was nonetheless evident.

“On the set, the truth that she had been my girlfriend simply by no means got here up,” he instructed The Guardian in 2015.

“I noticed her as Bathsheba, the character she was enjoying, who all the lads within the movie fell in love with. However it wasn’t arduous, with any person like Julie.”

With cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, Stamp helped choreograph the well-known fencing demonstration scene: by which Sergeant Troy’s sword expertise captivate – and finally seduce – Bathsheba Everdene.

However the movie obtained poor evaluations and failed on the field workplace. And Stamp fell out with the director, John Schlesinger.

“He did not strike me as a man who was significantly fascinated about movie,” the actor recalled. “Plus I wasn’t his first alternative: he actually needed Jon Voight.”

However Stamp’s star was starting to fade.

An outing in Blue – a “pretentious, self-conscious, literary Western with out a lot zest”, based on one critic – did not assist.

He was approached to play James Bond when Sean Connery relinquished the position, however his radical concepts of how he ought to interpret the character didn’t impress producer Harry Saltzman.

Stamp urged that he would possibly begin a Bond movie disguised as a Japanese warrior – and slowly reveal himself to be 007.

“I feel my concepts about it put the frighteners on Harry,” he speculated. “I did not get a second name from him.”

There was a spell in Italy the place he labored with the administrators Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini however, by the point he returned to London, the 60s had been drawing to an in depth and he was now not in trend.

“When the Sixties ended, I simply ended with it. I bear in mind my agent telling me: ‘They’re all searching for a younger Terence Stamp.'” He was nonetheless solely 31.

Disillusioned, he purchased a round-the-world ticket and located himself in India – experimenting with vegetarianism, yoga and residing in a non secular retreat.

It was there, in 1976, that he acquired a message addressed to ‘Clarence’ Stamp, providing him the a part of Common Zod in Superman.

Along with his main man days behind him, Stamp found that enjoying villains was liberating.

Superman and the sequel, Superman II, put him firmly again on the general public stage – and he appeared in a bewildering number of genres.

There have been Westerns like Younger Weapons, crime dramas like The Hit and The Actual McCoy – and even a gothic thriller in Neil Jordan’s fantasy, The Firm of Wolves.

However his impossible – and celebrated – efficiency was as a transgender lady within the Australian movie, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994.

Stamp was not eager to do the movie – actually, he thought the preliminary supply was a joke.

However a feminine buddy persuaded him to take the half – which noticed his character journey throughout the outback with two drag queens, performed by Hugo Weaving and Man Pearce.

“It was a problem, a problem I could not resist as a result of in any other case my life would have been a lie”, mentioned Stamp.

Over the following 10 years, Stamp appeared in two dozen movies – enjoying all kinds of elements.

In 1999, he entered the Star Wars canon: enjoying a politician battling corruption in Episode I: the Phantom Menace – an expertise he later described as “uninteresting”.

Extra satisfyingly, he starred in The Limey: as a profession English prison looking for his lacking daughter.

A decade later, he was nominated for a Bafta for his position because the grumpy husband of a dying lady in A Tune for Marion.

In 2002, he married for the primary time on the age of 64.

Stamp had met Elizabeth O’Rourke in a chemist store in Australia. She was 35 years youthful, and the wedding lasted six years.

Terence Stamp continued to behave properly into his 80s.

The elements – like his fleeting look as a silver-haired gentleman in Edgar Wright’s Final Evening in Soho in 2021 – grew smaller, though a sequel to Priscilla was in growth.

He might be remembered because the actor who blazed like a comet on the peak of the Sixties, surrounded by the last decade’s most stunning girls.

His profession fizzled near extinction, however he confirmed a powerful skill to reinvent himself – together with his skill to challenge type and menace bringing him to the eye of latest generations.

It was a profession that unfolded with no thought or planning, no clear technique and no objective in thoughts.

“I haven’t got any ambitions,” Stamp as soon as mentioned. “I am at all times amazed there’s one other job.”

“I’ve performed crap, as a result of generally I did not have the hire. However once I’ve obtained the hire, I wish to do the perfect I can.”