The director Terence Stamp hated working with: “I didn’t have a lot of time for him”
Few actors embodied the swinging sixties like Terence Stamp.
Known as much for his fast-living ways off camera as his work on camera, Stamp was a poster child of a bygone era marked by fashion, sexual liberation, and partying. By the time he died in 2025, however, he had amassed a filmography so formidable that no amount of infamous carousing could detract from it.
In fact, Stamp rarely gets the credit he deserves for the sheer range of his work and the guts that must have been required to do it. Playing General Zod in the Superman movies is one thing, but playing a magnetic, mysterious, overtly divine figure in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema is something else entirely. The former is campy and theatrical within the confines of ‘80s comic book aesthetics; the latter is experimental ‘60s cinema at its most philosophical and horny.
Throughout his career, Stamp seemed up for pretty much anything, even as he reached the age when many people – artists included – begin to retreat into conservatism, like in the 1994 road movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, he played a transgender woman in her late 50s, long before trans rights had become a part of mainstream conversation, and in Bliss, he played a sex therapist whose unconventional approach to his craft involves having sex with his patients.
He was also in Wall Street, Star Wars, the Get Smart reboot, and that atrocious Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston movie Murder Mystery, proving that he really could do it all, and while he worked with some of the most respected, artistically bold, and mainstream directors of his era, in all of his nearly 100 acting credits, there was only one filmmaker whom he really couldn’t stand.
In 1967, he starred alongside Julie Christie in the period drama Far from the Madding Crowd, which, clocking in at nearly three hours, was a sweeping romance that earned mixed reviews from critics and struggled mightily at the box office, and for Stamp, the reception was a dismal end to a dismal experience because he and director John Schlesinger did not enjoy working together.
“He didn’t strike me as a guy who was particularly interested in film,” the actor told The Guardian in 2015. “Plus, I wasn’t his first choice: he really wanted Jon Voight.”
Schlesinger wasn’t overtly hostile, he explained, but he showed very little interest in interacting with him, even when it came at the expense of the film. As a result, the actor turned to the cinematographer for guidance, and luckily for him, that cinematographer was none other than Nicolas Roeg, who would go on to direct such classics as Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing.
Saying that Schlesinger didn’t seem to have much interest in film is a bit harsh. He’d already made two movies with Julie Christie – Billy Liar and Darling, the latter of which was nominated for five Oscars, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. He would go on to make such classics as Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man.
Whatever the reason for their animosity, Stamp was willing to concede that the director knew what he was doing when he got into the cutting room. But beyond that, he remarked, “I didn’t have a lot of time for him.” Far from the Madding Crowd is neither man’s greatest achievement, but to its credit, that’s a very high bar to clear.
