The 1983 role Terence Stamp hated every second of: “I’d done it because I was broke”
Not many actors get Academy Award nominations for the first film they ever make, and even fewer have been flatmates with Michael Caine, but then Terence Stamp was definitely not just any actor.
When he died last year at 87, there were certainly plenty of tributes rightly paid, but perhaps because his heyday and his best-known roles came more than 50 years ago, or because he hadn’t been seen too much over the last few years as his health deteriorated, he may not have got quite the send-off he deserved.
Because, as far as British exports go, Stamp was one of the original and best, an actor who made his film debut opposite Laurence Olivier of all people in 1962, but then went even better the same year by winning both an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe nod for a Peter Ustinov-directed adventure on the high seas.
An enormous hit on both sides of the pond, Billy Budd was so good that even the famously acerbic critic Pauline Kael declared it one of the best films of the year, and it seemed that at the age of just 24, the handsome, blue-eyed Stamp would be the latest British actor to find fame and fortune in Hollywood.
And Stamp certainly did go on to be one of the more iconic faces of 1960s cinema, but he didn’t match the career trajectory of Caine, nor did he match what Sean Connery did early in the decade, perhaps because when he was approached to play James Bond, he put the producers off by being too forthright about how he thought 007 should be portrayed.
So the riches of those men never came to him, even if he was able to point to working with some legendary names in the industry, including the Italian director Federico Fellini, with whom he made an Edgar Allen Poe adaptation in 1968. Stamp’s track record of working with such luminaries continued when he made his way back to Hollywood in the late 1970s, filming Superman opposite Marlon Brando, and earning praise for his work as General Zod in the blockbuster that was a global success.
Stamp returned as Zod two years later in a sequel, but once again it wasn’t enough to bring him the kind of money you could retire on, and so he reverted to his homeland in order to make films like 1984’s The Hit with John Hurt, a road movie about a mob informer being kidnapped by two of his old associates to face justice. Featuring Tim Roth making his film debut, it wasn’t a box office success, but critics loved it, as did future director Wes Anderson.
Stamp has fond memories of making it, telling the BFI, “It was a great moment for me. I never made a lot of money, but I was really, really broke at the beginning of the ’80s, and I’d had to do a TV series because I didn’t have money for rent or to live. I did this series called Chessgame [in 1983], and it wasn’t bad, but I hated appearing on TV. I hated the work, I hated the workload, I hated that it was about dialogue not pictures. But I’d done it because I was broke.”
Chessgame was a six-part spy series that wasn’t very popular, and Stamp quickly moved on to making appearances in films like Wall Street, Young Guns and then at the end of the 1990s, Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. His final film was Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho in 2021, the director calling him ‘a true movie star’.
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