Terence Stamp enjoyed a late-in-life career resurgence. Photo / Getty Images
Film actor Terence Stamp, who has died aged 87, was once described as “the most beautiful man in the world”.
Propelled to fame in the early 60s by films such as Billy Budd and The Collector, Stamp seemed to be Britain’s answer to Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford. He fell in with a group of glamorous folk including Mick Jagger, David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton, whose photographs did much to sell magazines throughout the decade.
By the late 60s, and after a highly visible split with Shrimpton, however, the self-styled “icon” found himself alone, disillusioned with what he had once described as the “paradise of publicity”. He surprised his contemporaries by leaving London for Rome, where Pier Paolo Pasolini cast him in Teorema, as an angelic stranger who makes love to every member of a bourgeois Italian family. The film was confiscated for obscenity after it was screened at the Venice film festival, and Stamp left Europe for India.
Terence Stamp spent most of the 70s living in Poona, wearing a dhoti and practising yoga. He adopted celibacy, macrobiotics and distinguished himself from other followers of Krishnamurti by a devout interest in the philosopher’s dress sense.
“He’d slipped on a powder-blue wool shirt over the green one,” he recalled of the guru. “The two colours looked good on him.”
After his meeting with Krishnamurti, Stamp spent some time learning to whirl with dervishes before returning to Britain to appear in Superman in 1978.
In later life, Stamp gained a reputation – matched only by that of Shirley MacLaine – as an enthusiastic follower of what he described as “the path towards enlightenment”. Stamp re-established his career in the 80s: (“I need to be able to pay my rent and buy a bus pass”) but preferred to spend his free time reading philosophical texts and reciting mantras while standing on his head.
Terence Henry Stamp was born on July 22, 1938, in the East End of London, the son of a Thames tug-boat pilot. Having taught himself to read by studying his mother’s Woman’s Own magazine, he began to show an avid interest in the astrological predictions of Gypsy Petulengro.
“I was completely misguided,” he recalled. “I spent my whole early life believing myself to be a Leo. It wasn’t until 1968 that I discovered I was really Cancer.”
Stamp supplemented his reading with Rupert the Bear annuals, which he claimed to be of lasting value in times of emotional stress. “I still read Rupert today,” he remembered at 50. “I find it heightens my sense of my own emotions, clarifies things somehow.”
Perhaps prompted by a desire to emulate his ursine hero, Stamp surprised his family at the age of 11 by persuading his mother to curl his hair with a “Toni home perm”.
“My dad was a bit worried when he saw it,” Stamp recalled. “I think he thought I was going to turn into a ‘pansy’.”
While still at primary school he developed a passionate interest in personal adornment. “I dragged my mum all over the market,” he recalled, “looking for just the right pepper and salt jacket.”
By his early teens his family had given him the nickname “Lord Fauntleroy” because he spent so much time on his appearance.
After leaving grammar school, he was offered a job as a graphic artist with an advertising company, and at the age of 17 was earning twice his father’s weekly wage. He recalled being delighted when he was turned down for National Service because his feet were different sizes. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, two whole years to establish myself before my contemporaries caught up with me.”
He auditioned for a place at the Webber Douglas School of Dramatic Art and, when accepted, stopped working. “I didn’t want the security of easy money to get in the way of my art,” he remembered: “I needed to devote myself totally to it.”
In 1962, Peter Ustinov offered him a screen test for the lead role in Billy Budd after having seen him on stage with a repertory company. Stamp had been instructed by his flatmate Michael Caine that film directors did not like actors to talk unnecessarily during screen tests. “I was as quiet as a corpse,” Stamp remembered. “I hardly said a word through the whole test and it seemed to work.”
By the film’s release that year, he had become an international star. Oscar-nominated for Billy Budd, he went on to make a string of successful films including Term of Trial (1962), The Collector (1965), Modesty Blaise (1966), Poor Cow (1967) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967).
He was also emerging as a one-man caricature of the 60s. His brief romance with Julie Christie gave the Kinks their lines about “Terry and Julie” in Waterloo Sunset. He opened a fashionable canteen, Trencherman, in Chelsea with the photographer Terence Donovan, serving nursery food. And above all he had become, with the supermodel Jean Shrimpton, part of the most beautiful – and photographed – couple in London.
He described it as “the perfect sexual and emotional partnership in my life”. After three years, however, Shrimpton left Stamp in 1968 when she discovered that he was receiving a percentage of her salary for organising the promotional work she undertook.
“Jean was totally wrong about the money,” he recalled. “I was keeping 10% but had intended to present her with a lump sum as a surprise. Stealing never was my style.”
Stamp was contracted to begin shooting a Western, Blue, in which he played a young bandit. During his time in the United States he discovered marijuana and spent most of his time when not filming smoking “Acapulco Gold”, which he bought by the kilo.
He was also initiated into an American Indian ritual involving quantities of the hallucinogen peyote. “There appeared to be a flickering pale blue light glowing from my fingertips,” he recalled. “I closed my fingers together as if about to pray and the light jumped across. Was I starting to see the blue of my own aura?”
Returning to Britain disillusioned at the end of Blue, Stamp moved to Italy. After Pasolini’s Teorema, he worked with Federico Fellini on Spirits of the Dead and the following year appeared in The Mind of Mr Soames as a coma victim who must relearn the past 30 years.
But he was uninterested in the majority of parts he was offered, finding them glib and facile compared to his earlier roles in Billy Budd or The Collector. Announcing that the British “lacked emotional depth”, he departed for India in 1970.
He chose India after having spent the great part of his adolescence identifying with Tyrone Power in the 1946 film Razor’s Edge. Power played a young soldier, questioning the meaning of life, who is sent to India by a de-frocked priest and leaves Gene Tierney behind to seek enlightenment.
After travelling through India, Stamp spent some time with the Bagwhan Rajneesh in Poona where he began wearing saffron robes and practising yoga. “I got spotty as a vegetarian,” Stamp recalled, but held that “on a macrobiotic diet you stay beautiful forever, you never grow old.”
During his sojourn in India, Stamp was offered very little work. “They couldn’t give me away,” he recalled, “everybody had forgotten I existed. David Puttnam offered me three grand to do That’ll Be the Day, it was a terrible shock.” He continued to live in Poona, at the Blue Diamond Hotel, until in 1978 he received a telegraph addressed to “Clarence Stamp at the Rough Diamond”, offering him the part of the evil alien General Zod in Superman.
Superman was an enormous box-office success and Stamp appeared in the sequel made the following year. He went on to make several forgettable films in Italy, including Divine Nymph (1979), Amo Non Amo (1979) and Meetings with Incredible Men (1979).
But his career was rehabilitated, and during the 80s he made at least one film a year, choosing prestigious projects such as Stephen Frears’ The Hit (1984), in which he dazzled opposite John Hurt; Legal Eagles (1986) with Robert Redford; The Sicilian (1987), in which he gave a performance described by one critic as “languidly camp”; and Wall Street (1987), as Sir Larry Wildman, a character modelled on Sir James Goldsmith.
During the filming of Legal Eagles, Stamp started writing his memoirs (“I had a lot of spare time waiting for Robert Redford to come onto the set”). What was intended as a short homage to his late parents developed into a three-volume autobiography.
Condemned by some critics as self-indulgent, the three books dwelled at length on Stamp’s East End childhood (“I knew the melody, it was Little Dolly Daydreams, the song Granny Kate would sing when she made my marmalade sandwiches in the kitchen at Barking Road”) and ended in 1970 with a bleak Stamp on his way to India (“an emptiness inside me that mourns, that seeps darkness into my daily existence”).
In 1990 Stamp made his first attempt at directing a film, but after three weeks the project was abandoned with a loss of $5 million. The following year he returned to acting, appearing in Twenty One opposite Patsy Kensit.
His later film roles included the transvestite Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), for which he won a Bafta; an assassin in The Limey (1999); and a general in Valkryie (2008). He glumly revisited General Zod territory with a cameo in Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace (1999).
Despite flashes of brilliance, it was agreed that his career had never scaled the heights it once seemed to promise. The critic David Thomson wondered whether it was because Stamp was “chilly, difficult, a loner – or does he just give haughtily good imitations of these qualities? Whatever, it is remarkable that he hasn’t been more important: for he is a good actor … and seldom far from magic at his best.”
Terence Stamp remained unmarried until 2002, when he married Elizabeth O’Rourke, about 30 years his junior; the marriage was dissolved in 2008.
In later life he lived an almost ascetic existence in his rooms at Albany in Piccadilly. He travelled by bus (with a bus pass), spent little on food and nothing on clothes. “Everything I have is made-to-measure,” he said, “it will last longer than I will, besides I’m middle-aged and past all that now.”
He devoted two hours a day to meditation and yoga and claimed that he taught his numerous godchildren to recite mantras and to stand on their heads. “I’ve reached the point where all philosophy is essentially the same,” he recalled, “it has the same flavour, like eating honey.”
Terence Stamp, born July 22, 1938, died August 17, 2025.