“A lot of ‘em are gone…the old faces,” Terence Stamp’s Wilson says flatly an hour into Steven Soderbergh’s exquisite neo-noir “The Limey,” with a twinge of sadness he doesn’t allow himself to let breathe. Wilson has come from England after a nine-year stretch for petty crime. An escape followed by an escape. Stamp knew what this was like; he specialized in rebirth. He’d go away and come back once and again, circling back around to remind us that he wasn’t merely an enigmatic beauty, gifted with piercing blue eyes like he won the genetic lottery. The prettiest man in England. But could he act? When he arrived, he dazzled all, seeming to hoard awards and nominations, but it never seemed to faze him.
Like so many of his characters, he was created off-screen with a searing interiority; born standing with a zen-like command of his emotions. You could say Wilson was the part he was born to play, but that would be a white lie. He was born to be exactly who he was, and every character that found him. The pictures were born for him to play. He was a movie star, and he was an actor. But maybe more than that, he was a perfectly inscrutable face. Tragedy, comedy, and, as they say, a secret third thing: Terence Stamp. He’s gone, too, now. The old face and the young face, they’re all that’s left now. Happily, that’s more than enough.
Stamp’s childhood was a happy one, given the circumstances. He was born in 1938 in the once aristocratic hamlet of Stepney. He spent the most time with his loving mother as she gave him four more siblings by their literally remote father. He was a sailor, a stoker filling steamship furnaces with coal between stints in the merchant navy. When they weren’t dodging bombs during the Blitz as a child, he and his mother would go to the pictures. He remembered truly coming alive when, 23 minutes into William Wellman’s picaresque “Beau Geste,” a strapping Gary Cooper bounds down the stairs of an English manor and grabs an axe from a decorative suit of armor. He’s playful, but, as the film progresses, he shows his quality as a man, and of course, an actor who transcends whatever trappings in which he’s been placed. He’s having fun up there.
He was accepted into the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, which had already produced some of the most important British screen actors, like Donald Sinden, Angela Lansbury, and Patrick Macnee. Collecting the essence of Sinden’s posh strivers, Macnee’s clever John Steed, and Lansbury’s blushing flower in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” you get the heart of Stamp. After graduation, he started acting in plays, meeting future roommate Michael Caine in a production of Willis Hall’s The Long, the Short and the Tall, about a lost patrol in Malaysia during the Second World War.
His popularity grew and grew over the next two years. His first films add up to one of those perfect debuts like Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane” or Lily Gladstone in “Certain Women,” that make you glad screen acting exists. The first was Peter Glenville’s “Term of Trial” with a reserved Laurence Olivier as his foil, a stern teacher. Sir Laurence walks into his classroom full of delinquents and miscreants, and Stamp is just one more sneering face until he’s called upon. “Can you repeat the question, sir?” He asks, shoulders heavy with annoyance and embarrassment. “Repeating the question won’t help,” hisses Olivier. Stamp gets his first close-u,p and it’s like seeing the Mona Lisa. “No, sir, no, it won’t.” He has the downcast beauty, devil-may-care attitude, and feline body language of Robert Mitchum, the boxer’s posture of Jean Gabin, the eyes and seeping sexuality of Kay Francis. He’s dangerous, all the more so for looking like nothing ever phases him. “I’m thinking.” He isn’t kidding. He’d make a career of showing us what it looks like to think on camera. Peter Ustinov’s adaptation of “Billy Budd” followed, where he makes a meal of quiet logic and churning doubts.
“Billy Budd” was one of Herman Melville’s unfinished novels. It portrays a Christ-like sailor from Bristol, an orphan and ultimately a martyr. The martinet master of arms (played in the film with diamond-cut smugness by the great Robert Ryan) tortures Billy for his beatific insubstantiality. He seems more condition than man, and the wicked Claggart can’t stand it, putting the screws to him until finally, in a moment of squirming frustration (“a convulsed tongue-tie”), he kills the man. He punches him hard into a block of wood that cracks his skull. Ryan smiles at Stamp and then dies wordlessly. He has finally connected with Billy and now … release. Stamp’s face goes slack and empty. He looks not like a murderer but a victim of violation. He knows what’s coming. “Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!” Stamp, astride a ship like his stoker father, made for a perfect, earthbound seraphim, violent of contradiction, easy and free, yet capable, as all of us, of reverting to our most savage nature. Under that wind-blown blonde mane was a mind working so fast it looked slow, like a helicopter blade. He was nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta, won a Golden Globe, and inspired a Paul Weller song. His place in screen history was secure.
Stamp’s reluctance to fame meant he cut something of a Billy Budd-like figure himself for the next decade, an interloping innocent in a nest of vipers. His first-ever press scrum began with being asked if he minded being called Terry. “No…it’s my name.” He went home for Sunday dinner with his parents after it ended, ever the working-class boy. Nevertheless, Stamp accidentally courted the tabloids relentlessly. He dated models and actresses, did gorgeous photo spreads, and rocketed around Europe in top-down sports cars. If not for the broad accent and the spy craft, he’d be playing himself as a lethal playboy in Joseph Losey’s wonderful “Modesty Blaise”. He was the very picture of what would be called ‘the swinging sixties,’ his experience easily influencing a theatrical triumph as the lead of Bill Naughton’s “Alfie,” when it migrated from London to New York’s Morosco theatre. He’d been reluctant to do it, but roommate Michael Caine urged him. His lithe gigolo made heads swivel, and offers poured in, not least to be in Lewis Gilbert’s movie adaptation. He couldn’t make it work and suggested Caine, who happily obliged and became a star.
Stamp next starred opposite fellow Douglas Webber grad Samantha Eggar in William Wyler’s “The Collector,” which dug into another pocket of Stamp’s suit. He plays a quiet and sensitive psychopath, bent by virginity and child-like shyness, who collects butterflies and kidnaps Eggar to cure his loneliness. Stamp’s performance keeps the film moving, as Wyler’s flagging direction is caught between mod affectation and his old searching psychology.
Equally wedged between eras and sensibilities was John Schlesinger’s “Far from the Madding Crowd,” in which Stamp plays Sergeant Troy to then-girlfriend Julie Christie’s Bathsheba. The film’s best scene is his. Troy and Bathsheba meet in rolling hills, caught in Nic Roeg’s swooning widescreen frame, and he gives her an erotic fencing lesson. There are quite a few adaptations of Thomas Hardy’s novel, but none has ever managed to outdo this scene’s psychedelic brio; Stamp’s foxlike insouciance and schoolboy’s boastful romanticism make him the Troy to beat. On a personal note, I named my band after his character, so taken by the confoundingly lusty montage and Stamp’s remarkable performance.
Ken Loach’s debut feature “Poor Cow” was Stamp’s following picture and the antithesis of “Madding Crowd” and “Modesty.” Stamp is an improbably handsome but authentically working-class husband and father, stripping away the artifice of his last few pictures and allowing himself a shot at the “angry young man” school of edged simplicity.
Stamp moved to Italy in the late ‘60s (he was offered “Blow-Up” and Bond) and was cast by two of the country’s biggest directors. Pier Paolo Pasolini cast him in the scintillating “Teorema,” in which he seduces every member of an upper-class family, causing them all to implode. It would be Pasolini’s most unvarnished work until “Saló”, and it’s difficult to imagine an actor better suited to playing a sexual pied piper. In Federico Fellini’s “Toby Damnit,” a segment of the omnibus “Spirits of the Dead,” he plays himself in all but name. He’s an actor who has made a deal with Satan, pursued by paparazzi. He tools around Rome in a Ferrari, enveloped by an orange, hellish miasma. It may be the best he ever looked, rumpled, unclean, ash-covered, and hungover. The prettiest boy in England was becoming lined by drink and grayed by stress, but the prettiest he remained. He’d bounce around Europe the next couple of years, starring in forgotten Italian, French, British, and Spanish genre films, always as the depressive outsider. The work slowed, and he moved to one of Krishnamurti’s ashrams in India. He liked finding himself more than he wanted to be found. The only thing that brought him back was a telegram asking if he wanted to make a movie with Marlon Brando. The movie hardly mattered, but it happened to be “Superman”.
Stamp’s presence in “Superman” and “Superman II” is his best remembered by most moviegoers, imbuing General Zod with sadistic gravity. He never winks, he barely even blinks. The scene in which he invades the White House, the famous “Kneel Before Zod” scene, is rescued from daffy staging and hopeless mise en scène by Stamp. It gives me, a seasoned hater of all things caped, chills. I watch the scene on YouTube from time to time just to hear him say six words with iron certainty.
In 1984, Stamp entered his next act. He appears as a very modern devil in Neil Jordan’s adaptation “The Company of Wolves,” alongside Webber Douglas alum Lansbury. He’s the one striking deals now; elegance itself. “The Hit” remains one of Frears’ best films, a lightly existential yet still bloody and neurotic crime film. Art once more imitating life, Stamp plays a criminal who turned in his accomplices and now lives like a reclusive artist in Spain. He rejoins his old world when two hitmen (Tim Roth and John Hurt) show up to retrieve him. Hurt catches Roth sleeping on the job and runs to find a missing Stamp, only to discover him standing serenely before a waterfall, taking in the pleasant sounds and misty sights, the splendor of being alive just before he dies. Hurt nearly shoots, but the sight literally disarms him. Stamp turns to face him, and there is the Mona Lisa once more. The angel must hang.
The parts changed Stamp from a faded lead into an eccentric, philosophizing support pillar in films as diverse as the sci-fi phenomenon “Alien Nation,” the sex therapy drama “Bliss,” the zeitgeist-courting “Wall Street,” and the riotous showbiz farce “Bowfinger.” He was always memorable, even when the films were not.
He experienced one more rebirth when he played trans widow Bernadette Bassenger in the mainstream queer classic “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” His by-then weathered face and whiskeyed voice give Bernadette’s sorrow truth and dimension. 1999’s “The Limey” looks, in macro, like it was another rebirth, a film in which he plays a British gangster headed to Los Angeles for the first time to find out who killed his daughter, but it was something else: a eulogy in motion. He discovers fellow 60s/70s icons Peter Fonda, Barry Newman, and Joe Dallesandro waiting for him and, in a particularly Soderberghian flourish, he’s played in flashback by himself in “Poor Cow”. He is transfixing in his anger. You believe that he can take men half his age in a fight, his guilt having made him into an instrument of destruction.
It seemed like it could be another fresh start for Stamp, but after playing Wilson, he’d been there and done that. It was time to collect paychecks and fade away. The films were largely dreadful during his final decades, but he was always the deep voice of uncertainty on the edge of a film’s periphery. If he took your money after “The Limey,” it was because you were the highest bidder. But he always showed up.
“I work primarily for the camera—it’s not something I really talk about a lot, but it’s part of the way I am as a movie actor. The camera is my girl, as it were.” Just as in “Alfie,” “Modesty,” and ”Madding Crowd,” his girl came to him. Stamp went from the cinema’s most radiant blank to its most timeless sage without ever losing the knowing glare, the softness of his eyes, the potential for menace lurking in his every change of expression. He knew how to tell a story with the sight of him thinking through a situation. It is as delightful to watch him puzzle out a solution as it is to see him empty of thought, gliding through the world. He was the prettiest man in England, and always more than a pretty face.
“Tell me … tell me,” snarls Wilson in the opening seconds of darkness in “The Limey.” The old face is gone, but Stamp told us everything. One look said it all.
