Terence Stamp, a kid from London's East End, appeared in all the right films for all the right directors
, writer of The Kinks' indestructible Waterloo Sunset, has, in recent decades, denied that a key line refers to
Terence Stamp
and
Julie Christie
. The myth, however, is so intoxicating that the world will continue to believe. 'Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday night,' Davies sang in 1967. 'As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset I am in paradise.'
This was the same year Stamp,
who has died at the age of 87
, appeared opposite Christie in John Schlesinger's magnificent (and magnificently groovy) take on Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. Filmed in gorgeous, misty colours by cinematographer
Nic Roeg
, Stamp, as Sergeant Frank Troy, did almost as much for vintage military chic as did the precisely contemporaneous Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He and Christie, romantically linked off camera, were the age's signature couple: suave, casual, informal, staggeringly good-looking. Nobody better represented how, as the second World War receded into history, British youth shook off imperial chains and embraced colour and possibility.
Stamp, a working-class kid from London's East End, was in all the right films for all the right directors. He won best actor at Cannes for William Wyler's The Collector in 1965. He was in spy romp Modesty Blaise for Joseph Losey. He was in Poor Cow for Ken Loach. He was sinister in Teorema for Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The chiselled actor drifted away from the limelight in the early 1970s, but kept stubbornly returning for clever comebacks. Fascistic as General Zod in the Superman films. A charismatic gangster opposite John Hurt and Tim Roth in Stephen Frears's The Hit from 1984. Camp as chicory coffee in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert from 1994. Last seen referencing his own 1960s shapes in
Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho
from 2021, Stamp aged enviably into a foxy version of the man he had been when Waterloo Sunset was in the top five.
READ MORE
Terence Henry Stamp was born in Stepney as the eldest of five children (his brother Chris famously managed The Who). Stamp's dad, a tugboat stoker, had trouble getting his head around the lad's career. 'He genuinely believed that people like us didn't do things like that,' Stamp told Sight and Sound in 2013. 'He was a stoker, for Christ's sake.'
When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: 'They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp'
With dad away from home a great deal, Terence was largely raised by the women of the family – mum, gran, aunts. A smart kid, he first found himself in the other emblematic profession of the 1960s: working his way up the advertising business. He eventually won a scholarship to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in South Kensington and built on that training in repertory theatre. These early years sharing a flat with
Michael Caine
– and partying with
Peter O'Toole
– later took on the quality of legend.
Terence Stamp attends the memorial service of Sir Peter Ustinov, held at the St-Martin-In-The-Fields church, Trafalgar Square, central London, in November 2004. Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA
'The young Michael Caine was a joy to be with,' Stamp said. 'We had lots of wonderful times. I'm sure he wasn't trying to educate me, but he did. I was very new to showbiz, and he was a whole era older than me and had been in the business a lot.'
Stamp landed spectacularly with a feature debut as the impossibly good looking title character in Peter Ustinov's 1962 take on Herman Melville's nautical drama Billy Budd. The Oscar nomination that came his way confirmed the arrival of a supernatural force. Stamp then cleverly positioned a toe in all streams of the Swinging Sixties. He did social realism in Poor Cow. He did camp glam in Modesty Blaise. He showed a taste for arthouse with his chilling performance as sinister visitor to a bourgeois Italian family in Teorem. But that turn in Far From The Madding Crowd is surely the standout. It matters not a whit – indeed it is part of the appeal – that Stamp and Christie, though playing characters from the mid-19th century, looked to have stepped straight from Carnaby Street of a century later.
[
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'On the set, the fact that she had been my girlfriend just never came up,' Stamp said of Christie in 2015. 'I saw her as Bathsheba, the character she was playing, who all the men in the film fell in love with. But it wasn't hard, with somebody like Julie.'
In that same interview with the Guardian, he pondered how his fame withered round about the time the Beatles broke up. This didn't happen to Michael Caine. It didn't happen to Julie Christie.
[
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'It's a mystery to me. I was in my prime,' Stamp said. 'When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: 'They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp.''
The older Terence Stamp (still in his early 30s) reacted by taking a massive worldwide trip that eventually brought him to India. The rumour goes that, when the offer came, in 1976, to play the villain in Superman, it was addressed to 'Clarence Stamp'.
He never equalled the famously (often ill-advisedly) Stakhanovite work rate of Caine, but Stamp continued to secure decent roles at regular intervals. He finally married, at the age of 64, in 2002, but was divorced from Elizabeth O'Rourke, an Australian some decades his junior, just six years later.
Whatever Ray Davies might claim, Stamp (and Christie, still with us at 85) will always remain the immortal lovers in the magical normality of Waterloo Sunset.
'I've heard from some people that Ray Davies is now denying it,' Stamp said in 2013. 'But my brother Chris told me that Ray told him that when he wrote those lines he was picturing Julie Christie and myself. In the headlines, we were like the young people of the day. So, I was very flattered by that.'
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There were some people you were the better for seeing and others who left you feeling eviscerated; in Margo's experience, not all of the latter were women of her vintage, but many of them were. She sometimes missed all the Bridget Jones drama of her younger years: the enormous glasses of Chardonnay and the simple joy of taking silly things so seriously. She envied Eleanor her lingering ability to get up about the light over when she was last photographed in the Ulster Tatler, or whether people could tell she'd had a boob job or that she'd been using preventative Botox since her 32nd birthday, or that her devotion to cream soft-furnishings had gone too far. Alrighty, I'm away Margo. BTW, you look banjaxed. Yer not still workin'? Or are you just havin' a terrible menopause? You poor wee thing … Take care … You should get yourself up to David Lloyd in a Stella McCartney swimsuit. Treat yourself to some testosterone gel. Get you on the apps: talk to Rona (she dropped the 'B' after the divorce). She's retrained as a padel coach, got herself an eye lift and some hair extensions down in Dublin and has only gone and met Comber's George Clooney, on Silver Singles. He has a place in Portstewart so he does. And no kids! I'm away on ... Right now, Margo needed the loo. The brief hover and squat was not enough any more. The double void, advised her GP. You have no control over the bladder muscle so it isn't your fault. She had done her pelvic floor exercises, decades of yoga, park runs, coastal runs, sea swimming: all this before Covid turned the whole country into so-called Dryrobe wankers and wellness neurotics. No, there was no little repair job they could do. There would be a lifestyle adjustment. Not the best news, but not the worst. Margo said she was squeamish, could hardly take the dog to the vet, fainted when she gave blood. There are no TV ads about stagnant ponds of killer wee … only armies of Tena ladies living their best lives. Nothing marketable about urinary retention. Don't see any opportunistic C-listers jumping on that unglamorous bandwagon. Margo just wanted to be a Tena lady too – smiling in plastic pants at heritage gigs with other leaking ladies. Alas, this rite of passage was not to be. Oh to be worried about doing a star jump. Carefree pantyliners now, please! How did Margo, whom the silver fox in the post office in Ballyhack had just said looked far too young to be the mother of an adult human, end up wishing she was part of the 'pad up or put up' brigade? Last week's urodynamics test had confirmed what her doctor suspected. Still, when the chillingly composed urologist said the line, Would you like the nurse to show you how to self-catheterise now? Margo felt it like a dump tackle. She recalled her sister's rage when their doughty elderly mother had been discombobulated by an oculist (Lena had given him the sobriquet Dr Bank) on what she had thought was a routine medical visit: When did you first realise you were going blind, Mrs Lyons? Nothing routine about referrals. Still, Margo would get a second opinion and call the pelvic floor physio her sister had recommended. She was only 53. Snipers' alley , a colleague had called it. Injury time, the departure lounge, lifestyle-compromised, had been her mother's phrases for these bittersweet years. There was a spate of scarifying midlife ailments: cancers, strokes and heart attacks, and then, if people dodged those bullets for the living forever generation, they seemed to be golfing, or at least driving, until 93 or 99. Margo's yoga class was full of flexible but ancient beings who had made it through to the other side. She suspected that when their daily maintenance was done they napped until the next day's class. Or maybe they ran up the Mournes. Maybe they were having the best sex of their endless lives, like celebrities in magazines who insisted ageing was for losers who refused to put the work in. Some women were lucky or plucky enough to have opted for what was seen in Margo's day as the heretical, unnatural choice of an elective C-section, rather than the good-girl push and cut of an episiotomy in childbirth. A quick Google search revealed that as early as 1985 the WHO recommended the abandonment of routine episiotomies; something about incontinence issues and painful sex in later life. Meanwhile, shame, pain and chastity remained the holy trinity of Irish menopause for another generation of mammies. Margo was just stepping off the escalator when she saw her. If she was lucky Tara would turn into the posh Dunnes and succumb to a Paul Costelloe coat or a Catherine Donnelly jacket. No chance. Barrelling towards Margo, she whinnied: Hey girl! Otis got 10 A stars and has been selected to play for Ulster under 18s, Auerila is off to do Med in Durham and Hunter has been paddleboarding with me in Helen's Bay, and doing jolly super post-op. It was good to hear that the old golden retriever had rallied, his left side shaved and stitched after the sarcoma excision. Back on the water. He was such a sweet dog. But oh my days, those choreographed, perfect, boring, Hollister-model children, in their Lululemon and Birkenstocks, ordering oat flat whites and Buddha bowls in the claustrophobic confines of their postcode. Margo had tutored too many of them. She was sorry she didn't just nip down to Dunnes, but a ready meal meant it had to be Marks. [ 'I'm gone frail? Excuse me, but I'm as healthy as a goat' Opens in new window ] You look terrible Margo. I gave you the name of my acupuncturist didn't I? I don't know why you are so resistant to Chinese medicine. You need to factor in some 'me time', girl, listen to some podcasts, move them glutes, as my Pilates instructor says. Bless. BTW, some friends whose kids didn't do as well as ours were looking for a tutor so I gave them your deets. No pressure, but expect some drive-bys from the Gold Coast's finest. No, absolutely no need to thank me. My privilege, my pleasure darling. I'm all about giving back. Besides, that big old house won't heat itself. Defo doing Bay Tree coffee soon (post-pandemic side hug). Cheerio! Margo had been on track to live what her pal Jean called the Italian boots-Land Rover Discovery-gym arms life of the BT9ers (hashtag-stay-at-home-girlfriend) until she wasn't. Her time in the gilded cage had been long enough for her to feel more than a smidge of compassion for friends like Eleanor and Tara, and the monstrous bubble that both protected and destroyed them. Ladies who got to lunch rather than launch still had to attend to their perineum pain or their vulval dermatitis when either or both came for them. Margo remembered Tara, in a rare moment of oversharing by the tills last January, saying that she found herself opening the little doors of her mostly adult children's Advent Calendars and gobbling the nativity characters that no longer mattered to them; gorging herself on the chocolate version of the Christmas miracle in a teary frenzy, in full view of the window cleaner. Four years on from the death of her mother, Margo still savoured the memory of having been in this place with her 'There must be some kind of way outta here' sang Dylan as Margo put her earbuds in and walked past what the papers were calling the best jeans in the High Street. Good for M&S. She had started listening to music or radio in supermarkets during Covid. It had made those dystopian shopping trips more bearable. She smiled at Tracey, a member of staff she had known for decades, the older woman giving her arm a friendly squeeze as she bustled over to the till. Margo felt her eyes mist over. Too heartbroken to return to the empty house after the first post-divorce Christmas handover, she had found herself driving up here. After crying in the dark privacy of the underground car park she had put on her nude pink lipstick, reapplied her blue jean eyeliner and wandered around, glad once again to have a busy, suburban, brightly lit refuge where she could stave off being alone, maybe even being lonely, for a while. Four years on from the death of her mother, Margo still savoured the memory of having been in this place with her, however fleetingly. As shops, shoppers and shop fronts changed, the connections and the memories remained. That said, the centre was no longer the hub it had been for Margo and her contemporaries. Nests had emptied, husbands had died or left, or were left, lifestyles had changed. The emergence of hipster local shops on the edgy but somewhat gentrified Ormeau, a revamped Asian supermarket and an excellent Dunnes foodhall on the embankment (full of Neven Maguire goodies, great Irish ham on the bone, and yoghurts from west Cork), were all making Margo and others vote with their feet. She always bought her flowers from Marks. Lilies usually. You could take them to a wedding or a funeral. They celebrated and consoled. She mostly just took them home. Margo had been buying herself flowers for years, a decadent but necessary gesture (like the fire she lit most evenings). She liked the way they would bloom overnight or while she was out at work: enigmatic and majestic in the Judy Greene vase that held their elegant stems perfectly. She looked at the headlines, picked up The Irish Times and The Guardian and moved across to the checkout. The checkout girl, who was often working this late afternoon shift, looked so young. She always asked the same question in the same monotone voice: Are you doing anything nice today? No matter what answer you gave, the girl always said: Well that's nice, so it is. I'm going to look at intermittent self-catheterisation videos on YouTube, smiled Margo . Well that's nice, so it is. Sandra Kavanagh is a teacher and freelance writer based in Belfast
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
BBC postpones Ozzy Osbourne documentary with new date yet to be announced
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