‘His beauty was a curse' — Terence Stamp's five best films

Times

a day ago

Terence Stamp, who died on Sunday, was a gorgeous and gifted acting anomaly. His professional prowess was somehow lived backwards, with his best movies and his strongest roles arriving, belatedly, in his knockout autumnal years, while the glossy burst of stardom that defined his early career was often just that — glossy, admittedly beguiling, yet always hinting at a maturation that had yet to come.
His beauty, of course, was the curse. He tended, early on, to be shot by enthusiastic directors in long glacial close-ups, where cameras and audiences alike could swoon before that famous blue pellucid gaze (one that was making waves off screen too as a 'Swinging Sixties' icon, arm in arm with Jean Shrimpton). When he eventually spoke, sometimes haltingly, stiffly, from the back of his throat, still only in his early twenties (was he nervous? Shy?), it seemed as if he was breaking that magic.
In Billy Budd, in 1962, his choice of a broad Somerset accent was surprising, but also oddly distracting. He was better, seemingly calmer and more assured, when paired with the great beauties, and so bounced sweetly, joker-style, off Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise in 1966. And he found his perfect screen partner in Julie Christie in 1967's Far From the Madding Crowd. Their standout scene foregrounds delicate comedic timing when her dress is snagged on his spur and he stares deeply into her eyes and cheekily purrs, 'I'll unfasten you in no time!'
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When the work famously dried up for Stamp at the end of the 1960s and he retreated from cinema he said, 'It was a mystery to me. I was in my prime.' And yet this wasn't true. His prime began in 1994, at the age of 56, when he donned a wig and a frock to play the trans cabaret performer Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. He was utterly commanding in the role, and heartbreaking too, hiding a lifetime of grief beneath lipstick and one-liners. He was still, of course, striking looking, but the wrinkles, the thinning hair and the heavier, harsher delivery allowed him access to instant gravitas, as if he had returned from the professional wilderness with supercharged performance powers.
He was remarkable too in The Limey, playing a Cockney criminal in LA, out to avenge his daughter's murder. In that film's endlessly re-watchable and effortlessly iconic moment, after eliminating some enemy heavies, Stamp's antihero emerges bloodied from a warehouse and yells aloud to anyone in the vicinity associated with his mobster nemesis, 'You tell him, you tell him I'm coming. I'm f***ing coming!' It played like a clarion call, or an announcement to anyone who had underestimated a once forgotten Swinging Sixties poster boy. Tell them he's coming! And he did, and was always interesting, always the character that captivated on screen, in everything from Bowfinger to Full Frontal, The Adjustment Bureau, Song for Marion and Big Eyes. A gifted and richly rewarding performer, till the end.
This is the one, the role. Stamp had already proven his 'returning' chops on Priscilla, yet here he adds layers and depth, wit and humour. As a criminal from London over to wreak havoc in LA, he is funny and self-deprecating, even in constant deadpan. And he's gentle in places too, and always impeccably cool. But mostly he's scary, and brilliantly so. He somehow, repeatedly, turns the simple introductory statement 'My name is Wilson' into a terrifying threat.
This is Stamp at his most expressive, and yet controlled, and with nothing to lose. He's come back, effectively, from the professional doldrums, and plays the role of trans cabaret performer Bernadette in defiant deadpan throughout, even when she's kneeing a local bigot in the crotch and quipping, 'Now you're f***ed!'
Stamp played Superman's nemesis, General Zod, as a leather-clad intergalactic aristocrat. And yet the role really works because Stamp's tougher, angrier, east London accent keeps bursting out during key scenes. Such as, 'Come to me, Superman! If you day-are!'
This is later-era Stamp at his most assured. He plays the grumpy, maudlin husband of a woman dying from cancer. And yet, midway through the film, he begins to crack open emotionally by singing his pain. Have hankies for the scene where he launches, unaccompanied, into The Most Beautiful Girl.
Leave it to Ken Loach to pull the most moving and impactful performance out of Stamp's early career. He plays Dave, the dream boyfriend to luckless single mum heroine Joy (Carol White). He's also, alas, an ex-criminal, and so when the law catches up to him he must remain, in Joy's heart (and in the hearts of cinema-goers everywhere), an unattainable phantasm. Stamp here also does a deeply lovely rendition of the Joan Baez song Colours.