How Terence Stamp ignored convention and defiantly rose to success
Terence Stamp passed away at the age of 87 on August 17th, leaving behind a legacy as one of Britain’s most unconventional stars.
As an East End lad born in 1938, Stamp came through a rough-and-tumble, war-ravaged childhood, and few would’ve bet on this working-class kid ever ending up an Oscar nominee. Back then, the film industry wasn’t really set up for people from Stamp’s sort of background, with British stars of the 1940s and 1950s – like Laurence Olivier – usually coming from well-heeled families. But by the tail end of the ’50s and into the swinging sixties, things began to shift in the postwar climate, and British cinema started to show a real interest in working-class stories and, naturally, the actors who could bring them to life.
The kitchen sink drama – a specific strand of social realism associated with working-class Brits whose concerns included poverty, abortion, interracial relationships, homosexuality, and single motherhood – emerged triumphant. As the once stale cinematic landscape evolved to become more excitingly diverse, artists like Albert Finney and Rita Tushingham rose to success, with working-class actors managing to find more prominent positions within the industry.
It was during this time that Stamp was gaining acting opportunities on the stage, following a scholarship he won to study at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. It seemed like a new era for British actors. A Cockney or thick northern accent, for example, could now be an advantage – stars didn’t have to sound like they religiously sipped tea and had distant relations to the Queen to make it on stage and screen.
Alongside another working-class hero, Michael Caine (who just so happened to be his flatmate), Stamp was everywhere during the height of London’s stylish swinging sixties era, where the fashionable star slotted right into place. With his then-girlfriend, model and actor Jean Shrimpton, Stamp could be seen partying in the city’s coolest clubs, their relationship immortalised on celluloid by David Bailey. You couldn’t get much better than Stamp as an encapsulation of the decade’s increased interest in style and sexual freedom, with the actor appearing in everything from Billy Budd, which earned him an Oscar nomination, to the gritty kitchen sink drama Poor Cow.
He was one of Britain’s biggest stars, and as he embarked on a relationship with another of the country’s acting icons, Julie Christie, he continued to represent an iconic time in British culture. Fashionable, handsome, talented, and indescribably cool – Stamp continued to rise with performances in the likes of Far from the Madding Crowd and even an American western, Blue.
This could’ve been the moment that Stamp’s career shot him to Hollywood, to a world of brighter lights and bigger opportunities. Instead, he went to Italy and made a film with Pier Paolo Pasolini. How peculiar a decision, to opt for a European arthouse film while on the cusp of international domination – but that was Stamp. Teorema is a masterpiece, with Stamp playing a mysterious stranger whose arrival at a bourgeois family’s home results in each member’s downfall, his sexual power sending them all into an unnatural daze. Forget Saltburn, Teorema’s exploration of a man’s indescribable power over a rich family is truly transgressive, and the film even left Pasolini with an obscenity charge.
1968 also saw Stamp appear in Spirits of the Dead, a French-Italian horror movie co-directed by Federico Fellini, one of several other European titles he starred in over the coming years. From A Season in Hell to The Divine Nymph and Hu-man, Stamp’s acting credits from the 1970s are sparse apart from these few Italian films. What could’ve been a decade of blockbusters revealed the star’s apparent interest in authentic and deeply introspective cinema. He wasn’t interested in mere commercial fodder – Stamp was too busy living in Italy, and eventually India, where he studied yoga and distanced himself from Hollywood materialism.
Soon, however, Stamp re-familiarised himself with a world he had initially tried to forget. He took on a villainous role in Superman, which evidently tempted him back into the spotlight with an offer of a new chapter in his career. It would be his biggest project to date, and luckily for Stamp, it was a hit. Still, his choice of roles often surprised critics, and in the 1990s he earned widespread acclaim for a somewhat unexpected performance as a transvestite in the Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Clearly, Stamp had even more range than he’d ever let on to.
Some of Stamp’s roles during the 21st century were admittedly questionable, like Get Smart and Yes Man, but his final film performance arguably encapsulated his legacy. He starred in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho as a misunderstood elderly man, appearing alongside various other legendary ‘60s actors like Tushingham and Diana Rigg. The film explored the grittier side of the swinging sixties, and with Stamp playing a vital character, he brought his own experience of living through a blazing hot time in British pop culture – where stardom wasn’t necessarily guaranteed – to Wright’s horror tale.
Talking to The Guardian in 2015, he explained, “It’s a mystery to me. I was in my prime. When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: ‘They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp.’”
Concluding, “And I thought: ‘I am young.’ I was 31, 32. I couldn’t believe it. It was tough to wake up in the morning, and the phone not ringing. I thought: this can’t be happening now, it’s only just started. The day-to-day thing was awful, and I couldn’t live with it. So I bought a round-the-world ticket and left.”
