British actor Terence Stamp, a stalwart of cinema known for starring in Sixties classics and portraying supervillain General Zod in the Superman films, has died aged 87.
The Oscar-nominated actor, who starred in more than 60 films across his career, including Far from the Madding Crowd, The Limey and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, died on Sunday morning (17 August), his family said.
“He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, both as an actor and as a writer that will continue to touch and inspire people for years to come,” the family said. “We ask for privacy at this sad time.”
Stamp was born in London’s East End in 1938, the son of a tugboat stoker. He survived the Blitz during the Second World War, and straight after leaving school, pursued a career in advertising.
He later decided he wanted a career change, and won a scholarship to attend the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Soon afterwards, Stamp performed in a national tour of Willis Hall’s play The Long the Short and the Tall alongside another East End actor, Michael Caine. The pair ended up moving in together, and would hang out in London’s Soho with fellow British star Peter O’Toole.
Stamp’s first film performance came in his early twenties, as the title character in 1962’s historical adventure movie Billy Budd. It earned him an Oscar nomination and proved to be his big break.
The role was followed by turns in many classic Sixties films, including Term of Trial (opposite Laurence Olivier), The Collector, Modesty Blaise, Far from the Madding Crowd, Teorema and Ken Loach’s first feature film Poor Cow.
In Far from the Madding Crowd, Stamp starred alongside his ex-girlfriend, the actor Julie Christie. In the early Sixties, they had formed one of the country’s most glamorous celebrity couples. Stamp and Christie had started dating after he saw her on a magazine cover holding a submachine gun. The thespians were such an “It” couple that they even got a namecheck as “Terry and Julie” on the Kinks’ 1967 hit “Waterloo Sunset”.
Stamp had numerous other famous relationships in that era, including with Jean Shrimpton and Brigitte Bardot.
The actor was approached to play James Bond, when Connery first stepped away from the role after You Only Live Twice in 1967, but producer Harry Saltzman ended up changing his mind because, as Stamp later recalled, the actor’s ideas for the role “put the frighteners on Harry”.
During a talk at the BFI in London, Stamp recalled his encounter with Saltzman, saying: “‘The fact is,’ I said, ‘Sean has made the role his own. The public will have trouble accepting anyone else. But in one of the books, it starts with him disguised as a Japanese warrior. If we could do that one, I could start the movie in complete Japanese make-up. By the time it came off they are used to me a little bit. I would love to do it like that.’ He wasn’t impressed.”
In the Seventies, Stamp’s work quietened down a little, and he starred in films including The Mind of Mr Soames, A Season in Hell and Meetings with Remarkable Men.
During this period, he stepped out of the spotlight and studied yoga in India. Speaking about that time in a 2015 interview, he told The Guardian: “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.”
While he was in India, he got a telegram offering him a role in Superman. “I was on the plane the next evening,” he told the paper.
His casting as General Zod in Richard Donner’s 1978 film Superman and its 1980 sequel Superman II, directed by Richard Lester, served to revive his career.
Zod is widely seen as one of the greatest movie villains of all time, thanks to Stamp’s sadistic portrayal of the character and his memorable command: “Kneel before Zod!” The actor later returned to the Superman franchise, voicing Clark Kent’s biological father in the TV series Smallville.
Other notable credits include his role as a transgender woman in road comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, as well as playing gangster Wilson in The Limey in 1999 and Chancellor Finis Valorum in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace the same year.
The Noughties saw Stamp appear in Jim Carrey movie Yes Man, as well as Wanted, Get Smart and Valkyrie.
In the 2010s, when Stamp was in his seventies, he was seen in The Adjustment Bureau, The Art of the Steal, Big Eyes, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and more.
Between 2002 and 2008, Stamp was married to Elizabeth O’Rourke, who he’d first met in a chemist’s in Bondi, Australia, in the Nineties. She was 35 years his junior and they eventually divorced on the grounds of his “unreasonable behaviour”.
In 2015, when he was still working, Stamp told The Guardian: “I don’t have any ambitions. I’m always amazed there’s another job, I’m always very happy. I’ve had bad experiences and things that didn’t work out; my love for film sometimes diminishes, but then it just resurrects itself. I never have to gee myself up, or demand a huge wage to get out of bed in the morning. I’ve done crap, because sometimes I didn’t have the rent. But when I’ve got the rent, I want to do the best I can.”
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