When he first hit cinema screens, an unknown actor nominated for an Oscar in his debut role, Terence Stamp was acclaimed as the most beautiful man in the world.
His perfectly symmetrical features and dazzling blue eyes, topped with a boyish mop of tousled blond hair, were angelic. But when he grinned, his face radiated a sparkle of raffish mischief.
The girls he took back to meet his adored mother, at the East End home where he grew up, numbered actresses such as Julie Christie and Brigitte Bardot, and supermodels Celia Hammond and Jean Shrimpton.
Later confidantes included Princess Diana, who met him at a movie premiere in 1987 and was soon invited back to his decadently elegant rooms at the Albany in Piccadilly.
She shared his obsession with health foods, and he wooed her by cooking a risotto of mushrooms and brown rice – with the letters HRH picked out cheekily in truffle paste.
‘We’d just meet up for a cup of tea, or sometimes we’d have a long chat for an hour. Sometimes it would be very quick,’ he said.
Despite his charm and looks, Stamp never fully achieved the success predicted for him as an actor. His self-destructive tendencies were summed up by one wit who called him, ‘The man who threw himself off the edge of a decade.’
‘I have a lot of rage inside me,’ he said. ‘My acting is a kind of outlet for that. If I wasn’t an actor, I’d probably be a psychopath.’
Despite his charm and looks, Stamp never fully achieved the success predicted for him as an actor. Pictured: Jean Shrimpton and Terence Stamp during their relationship
Michael Douglas, Terence Stamp and Princess Diana at the Wall Street premiere in 1988
When his career first began to falter at the end of the 1960s, Stamp fled the film business
When his career first began to falter at the end of the 1960s, Stamp fled the film business and, though he made periodic returns, he was never again an A-lister.
Nor did he find happiness in love. He had no children and married only once, in his 60s, to a woman 35 years his junior.
They divorced five years later, and he spent his last years living in self-imposed exile.
‘I’d love to come back to England,’ he said, ‘but my taste has developed in excess of my earning capacity. Whenever I see a place that I like, I’m about a million or two short.
‘When I’m in London, I live in hotels or friends put me up.’
This rootless lifestyle was part of his appeal when actor and director Peter Ustinov first cast him in 1962 for the title role in Billy Budd, a young sailor unjustly accused of murder.
The job brought him £600, a Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer, and an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor.
Stamp was living in a shared house on Harley Street with a crowd of other actors, among them Michael Caine. The pair met during a tour of the provinces in a wartime play, The Long And The Short And The Tall.
Terence Stamp with Julie Christie for their film Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Michael Caine and Terence Stamp were former flatmates in London in the 1960s
Caine took Stamp, who was five years his junior, under his wing, teaching him survival techniques – such as where to go to pick up girls.
Chorus line dancers in end-of-the-pier shows were a favourite: ‘Maidens at a loose end, sometimes very loose,’ Caine joked.
Their friendship became strained when Stamp found fame while Caine was still struggling. ‘He had a goal: perfection and the top,’ Caine wrote in his autobiography. ‘I had a panic: survival and existence.’
They quarrelled about petty things, such as who had the bigger room. Stamp claimed Caine cancelled his morning papers.
But the real break came after Stamp was offered the lead in Alfie, a movie about a Swinging Sixties lothario whose soul is hollowed out by his pursuit of casual sex.
Stamp had doubts about the role and whether it was right for his career.
Caine spent three hours urging him to take it – and then, in exasperation, auditioned for the part himself. Alfie made him a star.
‘I still wake up screaming,’ Caine jokes today, ‘after nightmares that Terry listened to my advice and played Alfie himself.’
Terence Stamp at the premiere of ‘Valkyrie’ in Los Angeles on December 18, 2008
(From left) Sarah Douglas, Terence Stamp and Jack O’Halloran in Superman II in 1980
Terence Stamp and Julie Christie in the 1967 film Far From The Madding Crowd
Terence Stamp and his wife Elizabeth O’Rourke in Marrakesh in 2005. They divorced in 2008
This hesitancy became the bane of Stamp’s career. He turned down the role of King Arthur in the musical Camelot, with Vanessa Redgrave as Guinevere, because he feared his singing voice wasn’t good enough.
For the rest of his life, he regretted it: ‘When the movie came out and I saw Richard Harris do it, I thought, ‘Well, I could have sung it as well as that!”
And he originally rejected another role, as the timid obsessive who kidnaps a beautiful young woman, in The Collector.
‘I didn’t want to be a spotty invisible bank clerk with a snotty nose,’ he said.
He eventually relented and the movie, released in 1965 with Samantha Eggar as his victim, is regarded as a cult classic.
Other successes followed, including the spy caper Modesty Blaise, and Far From The Madding Crowd, opposite Christie. Their love affair was immortalised by The Kinks in a line from their hit Waterloo Sunset: ‘Terry meets Julie, Waterloo station, every Friday night.’
Despite this, he spent most of the late 1960s in an on-off relationship with a girl known as ‘the Shrimp’. Jean Shrimpton was bewitched when she first met him. But though he professed to adore her, he often treated her with offhand cruelty.
On one trip to London, he asked friends to give her bed and board while he was away for a couple of days then failed to return for weeks, leaving her in limbo.
Actor Terence Stamp is pictured before he played the lead in the 1962 film Billy Budd
Terence Stamp and Gemma Arterton at the Marrakech Film Festival on December 6, 2012
(From left) Sarah Douglas, Terence Stamp and Jack O’Halloran in Superman II in 1980
Terence Stamp and Julie Christie in the 1967 film Far From The Madding Crowd
Shrimpton was the most photographed woman in the world, with her face on hundreds of magazine covers. But when she suggested she might try acting, he retorted she had more chance of becoming a brain surgeon.
He met her while filming The Collector, when she was on the rebound after breaking up with photographer David Bailey. ‘She’s not like the usual model girl,’ he told the Daily Mail columnist David Lewin. ‘She can talk and she is bright. She is really my first girlfriend – steady, that is.’
Shrimpton was sitting next to him throughout the interview, mostly in silence, though she did chip in: ‘Terence says all models are freaks and I suppose he is right. After all, fashion is not all that important.’ Four years later, fed up with waiting for a marriage proposal that never came, she dumped him.
‘I’m a realistic sort of person,’ she later said. ‘I put up with quite a lot, but then I just walk away. I don’t think he was in love with me at all, and if he was, he had a funny way of showing it.
‘He was incredibly beautiful, and I was in love with his looks. I was infatuated and in awe of him, but I wasn’t in love with him.’
Stamp was devastated by her rejection. It came as his career was on the skids, his hopes of replacing Sean Connery as James Bond dashed when the role of 007 went to George Lazenby – with cosmic irony, a former model turned actor.
He refused to move to Hollywood: ‘There would have been Doris Day films for a lot of money, but then I’d have been trapped.’
Instead, he drifted into the drugs scene, dabbling with cocaine and LSD.
Terence Stamp and Julie Christie in the 1967 film Far From The Madding Crowd
Actor Terence Stamp poses for a portrait photo during the 2005 Cannes Film Festival in France
Terence Stamp and Julie Christie in the 1967 film Far From The Madding Crowd
Terence Stamp with Shirley Henderson at the Marrakesh Film Festival on November 19, 2005
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BREAKING NEWS
Terence Stamp dead: Superman and Far From The Madding Crowd star passes away at the age of 87
He and his younger brother Christopher were arrested in California in 1968 for smoking marijuana while driving in the Malibu mountains with a girlfriend.
A few months later, Stamp was fined £15 for driving his Rolls-Royce down Pall Mall at 65mph.
Reeling after Shrimpton ended their relationship, he left the country. ‘I bought a round-the-world ticket, which was kind of epic, and I just thought, if I like anywhere I’ll stay there.’
On the morning he was due to leave London, he came out of his apartment at the Albany, Piccadilly, and heard music echoing from a nearby rooftop. The Beatles were on top of the Apple building, giving an impromptu concert.
He talked his way up and spoke to John Lennon, teasing him that his long hair looked camp. Lennon insisted long hair symbolised strength, ‘like Samson,’ and for the next six years Stamp refused to cut his own hair, until it reached halfway down his back.
Exploring India and the Middle East, he became fascinated with different types of spirituality. ‘Tai chi, I was a whirling dervish, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t try, except incest or Morris dancing,’ he said.
He settled in Pune, 100 miles west of Mumbai, at a hotel called the Blue Diamond, with other English expats.
Dressing in a dhoti or white robe, he sat literally at the feet of his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, every day. Some of the lessons involved tantric sex techniques. ‘There was a rumour around the ashram that he was preparing me to teach the tantric group,’ he said. ‘There was a lot of action going on.’
Peter Fonda, Terence Stamp and Steven Soderbergh promote ‘The Limey’ on May 15, 1999
Terence Stamp during the filming of ‘The Mind of Mr Soames’ at Shepperton Studios in 1969
After a year, a telegram from his agent arrived. Stamp always swore it was addressed to, ‘Clarence Stamp, the Rough Diamond, Pune – it was like a miracle it was in my hand’.
The cable brought two job offers. One was a film about the mystic and spiritual teacher GI Gurdjieff. The other was Superman with Marlon Brando and Christopher Reeve. He took both roles. In Superman, he played the villainous General Zod. For the rest of his life, if he was in a benign mood, he would greet fans with a cry of, ‘Kneel before Zod, you bastards.’
Thrilled to have him back, his agent announced, ‘He knows who he is at last. It’s taken him a long time, but he’s grown up. He’s learned about himself.’
Part of that change meant abstaining from drugs and alcohol, and becoming a vegetarian. For the rest of his life he was an advocate of whole foods, and wrote recipe books on healthy eating.
But it also meant coming to terms with a difficult childhood, and decades dogged by a conviction that he was a disappointment to his father, Tom, a tug boat pilot. ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘we were a bit hard up.
‘After we got a television set, I’d watch plays, and I was always saying, ‘I’m sure I could do better.’ My father said: ‘I don’t want you to talk about it any more. People like us don’t do things like that.’
‘He never said very much and I knew how deeply he must be feeling inside to have spoken like that. We never talked about it again, but inside my head, it was just a pressure cooker building up steam. I loved the East End, but I felt it was my destiny to get out.’
He signed up to acting classes in secret, left home and spent two years at theatre school – and did not dare tell his parents until Billy Budd was about to be released.
Tom Stamp, a heavy drinker, died from cirrhosis, but not before Stamp was able to buy his parents a home in Kent, close to the fields where they had met as hop-pickers.
For the latter decades of his career, Stamp took work when he needed it, unconcerned by the quality. Sometimes it was good, such as his role in drag for Priscilla Queen Of the Desert. ‘I thought I’d resemble Candice Bergen,’ he joked, ‘but I look more like an old boot.’
But he never lost an air of regret that the promise of the 1960s, both for him and for the world, was not fulfilled.
‘Nothing changed,’ he said sadly. ‘We just got older.’