Terence Stamp pictured with Barbara Sukowa in 1987 film 'The Sicilian'. Photo: Collection ChristopheL via AFP
No matter the role, Terence Stamp (who died at age 87 on Aug 17) cut an irresistible figure, magnetic to watch.
He was the doomed and guileless title character in the seafaring tale Billy Budd, the megalomaniacal General Zod in the early Superman films and the world-weary transgender character Bernadette in the poignant road comedy The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.
In his 20s, when he sought a life beyond the straitened circumstances of his upbringing, he became a favourite of the London tabloids that relentlessly chronicled his relationships with model Jean Shrimpton and actress Julie Christie.
His romantic life was at one point so well known that he and Christie inspired the “Terry and Julie” in the Kinks song Waterloo Sunset, released at the height of the mid-1960s music and fashion scene known as Swinging London.
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Stamp, who died Sunday at 87, was especially memorable as the mysterious Visitor in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s surrealist psychodrama Teorema, a demigod who “visits an upper-class Italian family and then has relations with the mother, father, son, daughter and the family maid”, as The New York Times delicately described the film’s plot in a 1969 dispatch.
Few directors have been more sharply attuned to the suffocating strictures of class than Pasolini and, in casting Stamp, he chose an actor whose lasting imprint on late-20th century would, it turned out, owe as much to his looks as his shape-shifting ability.
He was born working-class in the East End of London, the son of a tugboat stoker and a mother who looked after him and his siblings.
When he said he had an interest in pursuing a life in acting, his father told him, “Son, people like us don’t do things like that,” according to an interview he gave The Hollywood Reporter.
As it happened, the times were on his side. Among the myriad cultural changes brought on by the 1960s was a migration away from traditional forms of masculine cinematic beauty, which favoured men of genteel appearance.
The generation of British screen stars preceding his tended to favour patrician-looking types like Laurence Olivier, whose family was established among England’s clerical elite, or Michael Redgrave, who attended Magdalene College at Cambridge.
Stamp was different. Not ruggedly handsome like Richard Burton, the Welsh coal miner’s son, or suave and saturnine like his fellow East Ender (and, for a time, roommate) Michael Caine, he was, rather, borderline pretty: a type for whom both women and men made fools of themselves.
Terence Stamp as seen in 2011 film 'The Adjustment Bureau'. Photo: Collection ChristopheL via AFP
“It started off in England and made its way here,” said Craigh Barboza, a professor of film journalism at New York University.
“There was this cultural shift. With it came the rise of these non-traditional good-looking actors and actresses – though I think mostly actors – who could suddenly fit into leading man roles.”
Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Oliver Reed were others in a cohort more likely to be cast as randy gamekeepers than lords of the manor.
And their looks were consistent with those of the rock stars and bad boys populating “Box Of Pin-Ups, 1965”, a compendium of portraits by photographer David Bailey that stands as a definitive record of a groundbreaking era.
Stamp embodied “the tough, sexy look of somebody who was really attractive in a way that broke down class barriers”, said Vince Aletti, a critic and essayist who writes about photography for The New Yorker.
A favourite of fashion magazines, Stamp was less notable for his attire – not for him the Nehru jackets and rudraksha beads of the Beatles or the Tommy Nutter suits favoured by the Rolling Stones – than as the sexy and slightly louche armpiece for women like Monica Vitti, Brigitte Bardot, Christie and Shrimpton.
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Vogue editor Diana Vreeland was instrumental in making Stamp an emblem of his era, Aletti added.
A canny editorial tracker of what she deemed a cultural “youthquake”, Vreeland ”was all about anything that was young, young, young”.
So much of what we now think of as 1960s energy had its roots in the underground, added Barboza, and equally in the so-called lower classes.
With his smouldering looks, and no particular effort, Stamp helped relax the rigid parameters of what constituted male beauty onscreen.
He and others in his crowd, said Barboza, “changed the face of movies – literally”, ushering in an era of irresistible cinematic bad boys.
“Terence Stamp looked like pure trouble,” Ann Magnuson, the actress and performance artist, said over the phone. “He was mad, bad and dangerous to know. But you wanted him.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
