Why Terence Stamp was THE icon of the 60s

Yahoo

18 hours ago

The actor was a defining presence in British cinema during the 1960s.
When it came to casting his swinging 60s-set drama Last Night In Soho, director Edgar Wright peppered his film with actors whose fame was tied to the decade of peace and love. But of all those players – Diana Rigg and Rita Tushingham among them – it was the late Terence Stamp whose face was the most synonymous with the era.
That line about "Terry and Julie" in The Kinks' 1967 masterpiece Waterloo Sunset? That's Terence and Julie Christie, they're namechecking. Meanwhile, go to any exhibition of photographs from that ultimate chronicler of the decade, David Bailey, and you'll see Stamp's portrait among them.
Once dubbed 'the most beautiful man in the world", the actor would date some of the era's most beautiful women, including Jean Shrimpton, Julie Christie and Brigitte Bardot. "I was in my prime," he reflected in 2015, "but when the 1960s ended, I ended with it."
As a working-class boy made good, Stamp was as much a personification of the socially liberal 1960s as his one-time flatmate Michael Caine. But Caine, who was already 27 at the dawn of the decade, was never tied to Swinging London like Stamp was.
Read more: Terence Stamp dies at 87
Five years Caine's junior, he was much more a contemporary of the era's hippest names, partying with the decade's biggest rock stars (his brother Chris managed The Who and Jimi Hendrix) and being sought after its more art house filmmakers, from Joseph Losey (Modesty Blaise) to Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema) to Ken Loach (Poor Cow).
Stamp was just 24 when he made his big screen debut as the titular Billy Budd in Peter Ustinov's widely successful historical epic. The movie won him rave reviews, plus an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a Most Promising Newcomer BAFTA nod, jumpstarting a career which would take in such classics as The Collector (1965) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967).
His role as an icon of the '60s would have been even stronger had he not lost the lead in one of the decade's defining films. Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up starred David Hemmings as a David Bailey-inspired hipster who finds himself accidentally photographing a murder, but it was Stamp who was originally cast, only to lose the role shortly before filming began.
"I don't know why they didn't use Terence Stamp," Bailey would say in 2012. "He was less of a sissy than Hemmings, and at least he was from the East End like me."
A brush with Bond
Another near-miss was the character of James Bond. When Sean Connery left the role after 1967's You Only Live Twice, Stamp, quite naturally, as one of the country's most in-demand and desired actors, found himself courted by the franchise's co-producer, Harry Saltzman.
"He took me out for dinner at the White Elephant in Curzon Street," the actor recalled of his brush with Bond. "He said, 'We're looking for the new 007. You're really fit and really English.'
"Like most English actors, I'd have loved to be 007 because I really know how to wear a suit," Stamp said. "But I think my ideas about it put the frighteners on Harry. I didn't get a second call from him."
The part likely would have been an ill fit for the actor. He was possibly too counter-cultural and too bohemian for the role of the solidly Establishment James Bond. Shortly after his meeting with Saltzman, he would work with Federico Fellini on the arthouse horror Spirits of the Dead and was introduced by the director to the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, ending up walking the classic hippie trail — practising yoga, going vegetarian and living on an ashram.
"Kneel before Zod"
The flipside of being the embodiment of an era, however, is that you're often out of favour once that decade passes. And so it was with Terence Stamp as the '60s drew to a close, when at the age of just 32, he found himself considered a has-been.
"I remember my agent telling me: 'They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp,'" he said years later. "And I thought: 'I am young.' I couldn't believe it. 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.'
Stamp was long past his commercial peak when he was offered the role of General Zod in Superman: The Movie (1978) and its 1980 sequel Superman II. However, the part of the Man of Steel's Kryptonian nemesis would prove one of his most popular, and kickstarted a renaissance that included roles in such movies as The Hit (1994) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).
Then, in 1999, Steven Soderbergh cast him as an ageing British hit-man in The Limey, which traded off Stamp's pretty boy past by including clips of the actor from the 1967 film Poor Cow, used as flashbacks to the character's youth.
There may have been successes in the '70s and beyond, but it's that golden run of movies in the 1960s for which Terence Stamp will be forever remembered. As a working-class lad from the East End who became one of the most popular and bankable stars of that decade, he represented the era like no other actor.
He was the poster boy not just of Swinging London but of a new social mobility, and for that, his place in our cultural history is guaranteed.