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New Statesman
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Remembering Terence Stamp
Photo by Larry Ellis/Express/We adored Terence Stamp, the best looking of all the East End boys, the new celebrities of the Sixties. He was so glamorous and he was in love with Jean Shrimpton, the pony club girl who'd become a top fashion model. We whispered, 'He's the most beautiful man in the world.' At a party I asked my host, 'Who is the man over there who looks just like Terence Stamp?' 'He is Terence Stamp. I'll introduce you.' Terence was polite and disinterested talking to me till I said, 'What's your day? What d'you do after you wake up in the morning?' His amazing blue eyes looked deep into my far less amazing blue eyes. 'I get up at five. Do my Yoga exercises. Tie my feet together and stand on my head. That sort of stuff you know. Then I have a bath in my Japanese bath.' I said, 'But you said you live on the top floor of The Albany in Piccadilly and I know there's no lift, and a Japanese wooden bath has to have water in it so how did you get it all the way up the steep stone stairs?' 'Yes. I had to have it. It was flown back from Japan full of water. I was filthy rich then. It cost me five thousand quid.' He laughed so happily at this crazy act of indulgence. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe I asked him, 'D'you ever write stories?' He looked sad and said, 'I wrote a novel, a trilogy, based on a game of chess. When Jean Shrimpton left me I threw it on the fire.' 'Any copies?' I asked. 'Nah, I didn't make a copy.' 'Well you can tell a good story and I'm a literary agent and I love stories so if ever you want to write some more come and find me.' I gave him my little cream coloured card with an owl above my name. He took to coming round at teatime on Thursdays to Primrose Hill ostensibly to talk about writing but he really enjoyed asking my two little girls aged four and five questions. He brought along Green Tea and told me bossily I should drink it and no other. I said it's a horrible taste, no thanks. He also atecakes made with no wheat years before gluten free was a thing. He came via an indirect route sitting on the top of a double-decker bus. I said there's a quicker way to get here on the Tube. He said, 'I like to take the scenic route and Routemasters are the best things in London.' One Thursday he said, 'I don't know when I'll see you again. I'm like that.' 'Where are you going?' I said. He said, 'My mum's not well and I'm filming.' Three months later a brown A4 envelope arrived with my name and address written in capitals in sepia ink. His note said, 'I've begun. Sorry about writing, spelling and grammar. T.' On Desert Island Discs he says, 'I met this publisher and she kept on at me.' He just told lies so he always looked superior. I read his 14 pages every word in capitals in his sepia ink describing being a boy in the East End in a family with not much money to go round. It was lovely to read. A natural writer with cadence and a gentle ironic humour. Liz Calder and two friends started up Bloomsbury Publishing. Stamp Album was their first non-fiction book. The first of Terence's memoirs trilogy. He refused the usual advance payment so as to weasel out of paying taxes. I wrote a contract with a £1 advance and put in a clause that committed Bloomsbury to a big print run of the book. An advance is usually the incentive for the publisher to pay for publicity and to risk printing lots of copies. Liz at Bloomsbury said no to my clause, as no precedent for it existed. I said precedent-schmesedent: that's not a reason to refuse my clause. Terence said, 'Why are Bloomsbury being so slow with my contract?' I told him. He said 'They're making a mistake about not wanting to print a lot of copies. I haven't done any films for years and people will come out to hear what I've been up to. If there aren't copies to buy it'll be like when Michael Caine and I shared a West End flat and he goes to all the parties and meets all the girls and I'm too shy to go and he says to me, 'You can't fuck girls you 'aven't met, Tel'!' I say that to Liz and we laugh and she says ok to the clause going in the contract. Stamp Album has great reviews. Terence asks me 'I know what being in the top ten sellers is but what's the TLS? Bloomsbury are very happy I've got a good review in the TLS.' I say, 'It's the Times Literary Supplement and that means you can stop worrying about writing, spelling, and grammar. You're a proper writer.' It was an extraordinary sensation walking along a street next to Terence Stamp. Every man and woman stared straight at him. No man even glanced at me, though I was quite pretty then. His face, his 'threads', beautifully cut suits, silk shirts, little mother-of-pearl shirt buttons, his own design gold cufflinks, his handmade shoes – and he'd never ever hurry. Passers-by were mesmerised at the sight of him. He said he'd been taught Kenjutsu, the Japanese Samurai skill of running fast, almost flying, around a sword, to show strength before an enemy. He advocated Pilates way before it was fashionable and he faithfully kept on doing meditation. He watched Channel 4 News in his flat in The Albany saying, 'It's the best one, I don't bother with the others.' He'd bicycled past The Albany entrance when he was doing paper deliveries. 'They wouldn't let me look inside the gate. I said to myself, 'I'll live in there one day.'' Fortnum & Mason across Piccadilly became his local green grocer and lunch place. I hardly saw him for years. He'd suddenly call and say, 'I'll meet you up at Louis at 4pm.' Louis is the famous old Patisserie in Hampstead. As if I had nothing else to do in my life. I nearly always went. He'd grumble about some film producer who wasn't paying him enough. I think the East End boy in him was always suspicious he'd get short-changed. One time I was in pain andhe told me to shut my eyes and to think: what shape is the pain? Is it round or square or oblong or what? Then to imagine the shape smaller and my pain would get less. He was a mind over matter kind of a man. And seriously spiritual after he'd lived in India. The last time I saw Terence he called and said, 'Have you still got the dog called Sam?' I said 'Yes.' 'I'm coming round with my wife. She likes dogs.' He drove a Rolls Royce. Came into the kitchen with his – far younger than him now he was in his sixties – bride. She played with the dog. He told me mytwo little girls, now teenagers,by chance sat next to him at a Youth Event at the National Theatre and he'd said to them, 'You're Charlotte and Julia Bulia. D'you remember me?' The girls said, 'No. We don't know you.' He said to them, 'You can put my name on a letter.' [See also: Celine Song's Materialists makes a business of love] Related
Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Times
‘His beauty was a curse' — Terence Stamp's five best films
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!' • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews 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.
The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
When The Herald met 'beautiful' Terence Stamp
His dad called him "the horizontal champ" for the way he used to lie in front of the fire like an exotic cat. Ask anyone about Terence Stamp and before you can say face of the sixties, the Terry who met Julie at Waterloo Station every Friday night, beau of Jean Shrimpton, sweet transsexual in Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, or Steven Soderbergh's London gangster in The Limey, the word "beautiful" comes up. Never handsome, always beautiful. "He'll be the first to admit how beautiful he still is," says Paul Andrew Williams, the director who has taken the looker from Bow and turned him into a grumpy old man in the new British comedy-drama, Song For Marion. With Vanessa Redgrave as his wife, the pair play an ordinary, elderly couple living on a council estate. Marion is ill and keeps her spirits up by singing in the local choir, Arthur is terminally grouchy and terrified about losing the love of his life. Stamp may not know much about being ordinary, but he's a Nobel prize winner when it comes to broken hearts. Stamp and Shrimpton were the Posh and Becks of their day, Burton and Taylor without the bling. Famously choosy about the parts he plays ("I don't like to do crap unless I haven't got the rent," he writes in his memoirs), Stamp, now 74, thought Williams had written a wonderful script. Having seen one of his previous films, the thriller London To Brighton, and had a look at the rest of the cast list, which includes Gemma Arterton as the choir mistress and Christopher Eccleston as Arthur and Marion's son, Stamp knew Song For Marion was going to be a cut above. But that B word, beautiful, kept nagging at him. "How can I say this without seeming unusually vain -" he begins. There is a long pause. It is going to be the first of many as we take tea on the rooftop terrace of a hotel during the London Film Festival. Stamp, who has devoted a fair part of his life to seeking enlightenment from the East, is a man who is very comfortable with silence. He takes his time to get just the right answer. Waiting for him to do so would normally be torture for an interviewer facing a ticking clock, but the answers are worth waiting for (not always the case with actors), and, in Stamp's case, let's just say the view while you wait is not too shabby. While considering whether he should do Song For Marion, a friend told him there was only one problem: everyone would know he was a pensioner, and once that door was opened it could not be closed again. "He knew I don't see myself like that." Nor do most people. Courtesy of his films and photographs, some of the most remarkable taken by David Bailey, Stamp's beauty is a matter of record, like parliamentary debates and court rulings. Michael Caine, with whom Stamp shared a flat in the early, hungry days, told him the camera was "his lady" and to never forget that. He should have added that while the lady never ages, those she gazes upon always do, eventually. Michael Caine, David Bailey, Julie Christie, Jean Shrimpton, Federico Fellini, Marlon Brando (his Superman II co-star), Princess Diana ("her company was heaven"), Bob Dylan - like Woody Allen's Zelig, Stamp has collected famous friends, co-stars, lovers and acquaintances like, well, stamps. It is not bad going for the son of a tugboat captain from the East End of London, as he would be the first to admit. Born in 1938 to Tom and Ethel, Stamp was the first of five children, one of whom, Chris – manager of The Who – died last November at the age of 70. Hearing him speak about his mother and father, and the way he writes about them, it is clear that he saw something of his own parents in Arthur and Marion. Like them, they were "twin souls" who had found each other in the maelstrom of life. There is certainly something of his father in Arthur, a working-class man who loves his son dearly but would never say it openly. We start to speak about his father when discussing his Song For Marion costume. Clothes are to Stamp what oxygen is to the rest of us. They matter. A lot. In the case of Arthur's character, it was the Clarks desert boots that proved to be the madeleine. When he was younger, Clarks dezzies were the very dab, he recalls, but you could only get them in a few places, Glasgow being one of them. He got his first pair when he started earning as an actor. "My dad was very elegant, very poor but very elegant. My brothers and myself, those of us who had taste, got it from my dad. He just had it. He didn't have money but he had style. Part of the great pleasure of my success was getting him things he could never have afforded. Even when I was not well off I managed to get him a pair of Clarks." Dad was good looking and funny. He could have had any woman he wanted, says Stamp. "But he only ever loved my mother. What he gave up was extraordinary, really, in order to keep her. Like, she wanted kids; he would never have wanted kids. He was like me, a loner. So he sacrificed. But what he got was this love of his life. He was never unfaithful. He was a drinker but every Friday he brought home the wages. I thought, that's like a twin soul relationship." Stamp was not as close to his dad as he was to his mum. It was the way of the times. Stamp senior had gone to sea when he was 15. He grew up in a tough, all male environment where it wasn't the done thing to reveal your feelings. "He was very funny but rather wicked funny. He was only really social in the pub – I don't remember anybody coming into our house, no visitors." Terence was his mother's son. She never wanted him to leave home. It was her death in 1986, while he was in New York filming Legal Eagles with Robert Redford, that started him writing. He wrote her a letter and set fire to it in Central Park ("a gesture I felt she might appreciate") and he hasn't stopped writing since, producing three volumes of memoirs, a novel and even a cookbook. The memoirs are funny, tender and wise, like Rupert Everett minus the bitchiness. Be warned, however: the reader has to endure a fair bit of Eastern mysticism and actorly musings about craft along the way. He also has a thing for star signs. Stamp had his own "twin souls" experience once, and it was not, alas, with Elizabeth O'Rourke, whom he married in 2002. She was a former pharmacy student and 28, he was 64. His first marriage, it lasted six years. "She just got bored with me," he says. "People find that hard to believe, how did she get bored? She got bored! The kind of life that I was leading, after the thrill of the first few years - This is me giving her an opinion. I have never really spoken to her about it. I realised that this was not how she envisaged it." His twin soul was the Shrimp, Jean Shrimpton, the original supermodel, even more super than Twiggy. When he first met her she was with David Bailey, and her beauty made him gasp every time he saw her. My God he adored her. He loved her so much he became terrified of losing her. When she briefly left him his fears became real. "Unable to contemplate life without her, I pushed her away," he wrote in Double Feature. He fell into a deep depression, complete with suicidal thoughts. He got high. At one point he lay down and willed himself to die, like an animal. He picked up a couple of hitchhikers who then pulled a gun on him. Such was his mood of despair he told them to "pull the trigger or piss off". They ran from the car. Looking back today, he realises he was just young and careless, careless about other people's feelings. He believed she would love him for ever. "I thought it was always going to be like that, I didn't realise that was it." He can even say now that her ending the relationship was "probably" the best thing that happened to him. The way he tells it, his life was a ship that left Southampton bound for Shetland, but due to a tweak on the compass, he wound up in Reykjavik. (Since we've got the atlas open, I should say that he now lives "on the move" between London and the US.) "That's what happened to me. I wound up in Reykjavik because [Jean leaving] was such a shock. It proved to be such a shock to me that I began to view my life differently." He went travelling, to India, Egypt, Japan and Ibiza (to help on a friend's organic farm), and sought enlightenment from wise men wherever he could find them. In one case it was the guru Jiddu Krishnamurti, in another it was Fellini, the director who cast him in 1968's Spirits Of The Dead and pulled him out of the post-Shrimp slump. Wherever he has gone, whatever he has done, from working on his 1962 breakthrough film Billy Budd, directed by Peter Ustinov, or with Soderbergh in 1999's The Limey, he is always asking questions and seeking advice. Perhaps that's why people are forever finding him beautiful. By fixing them with those dazzling eyes, and being interested in them, he makes his subject feel like the most fascinating thing in the room. They see themselves in him, like a mirror, and like what they see. Beautiful people can do that. When he was the face of the sixties fame had its pleasures, and plenty of them. No restaurant was ever fully booked if Tel turned up. Tailors struck oil when he walked in the door. His ex-wife once said he knew more about clothes than acting. Today, for fellow dedicated followers of fashion out there, he is wearing a corduroy suit the colour of runny honey, a blue and white striped shirt that brings out the azure in his eyes, and handmade shoes. He tells me the dates when everything was bought: 1969, 1968, the suit he acquired for a movie. He buys things to last. Comes from once having nothing, he says. His dad was the same. It was his dad who, seeing young Terence's fascination with actors when the family got its first television, told him: "Son, people like us don't do things like that." But he did, and after Billy Budd, for which he received an Oscar nomination, he was phenomenally successful, even if he was sometimes a lousy picker of parts, leaving Alfie to Caine, Georgie Girl to Alan Bates, and Camelot to Richard Harris. He became what he calls one of the "young, educated, working-class tigers let loose on the world, and on showbiz". There was still the sense of something missing, though. Although he had been a grammar school boy, he left school feeling he hadn't learned very much. "I was a kind of a conundrum. I wasn't stupid but I appeared to be stupid because I couldn't learn by rote. So everybody just assumed I was thick." Fame bought him two things: the confidence and means to carry on acting (to eat well, to look good), and the money to buy books and other beautiful objects. He had an eye, or when he didn't he had a friend who did. It was the books in particular, more than the chichi restaurants or other trappings, that gave him the biggest kick. "I could study anything. That's what I did." He has made fortunes and lost them, most of the latter being done in his "resting" and travelling years when he couldn't get work or didn't fancy what was offered. His comeback came with 1994's The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, in which he played Bernadette, a transsexual hauling herself, with two drag queens, across Australia. He says he looked like "an old tomcat", but critics and audiences alike warmed to the comedy. The Washington Post said he looked like "Marlene D with killer eyes". The Limey, in which he played an East End geezer coming to avenge the death of his daughter in LA, brought him to a new audience. The likes of Wanted (with James McAvoy), Yes Man (Jim Carrey) and The Adjustment Bureau (Matt Damon) followed. The old hipster had become hip again. The face of the sixties had made it to the noughties. And now he's donning an 'orrible old raincoat and a scowl in Song For Marion. It is a risk in some ways. For the first time in a while, the "horizontal champ" is standing up and asking to be counted more for his acting than his looks. He even sings, something he has long been reluctant to do on screen. He is not worried, he says, but he is curious as to how people will respond. When he looks in the mirror in the morning, what does he see? A figure that's ageing, he says, but that doesn't chime with what he feels is the reality. It will be terrible, he says, if he stays young here – he points to his head – but his body won't work properly. It comes to us all, I offer. Age, the great leveller. "Of course it does, but it's very in focus with me because there's no sort of retirement, as it were. Things keep coming up and I keep engaging." In The Limey, Stamp starred alongside Peter Fonda, another young tiger of the sixties. In one scene, Fonda's young girlfriend is lying in the bath asking him questions about all that ancient history. "Must have been a time, huh?" she says. "A golden moment." For Stamp, it was. And for Stamp, though older, the golden years go on.
BBC News
a day ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Terence Stamp: 1960s icon who was the 'master of the brooding silence'
Terence Stamp's dashing good looks and smouldering glare made him a star of 1960s of the stalwarts of Swinging London, the working class actor's first film earned him an Oscar actress Julie Christie or supermodel Jean Shrimpton on his arm, he specialised in playing sophisticated villains: including Superman's arch nemesis, General Zod, and the petulant Sergeant Troy in Far From the Madding Guardian called him the "master of the brooding silence", but Stamp's acting proved to have range as well as years after his career began, he shocked his fans - but picked up a Golden Globe nomination - as Bernadette Bassenger in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Terence Henry Stamp was born in Stepney, east London, on 22 July father, a man Stamp once described as "emotionally closed down", was a ship's stoker and often away from Terence's interest in acting began to blossom when his mother took him to the local cinema to see Gary Cooper in Beau Geste, a film that left a deep impression on enduring the Blitz in the east end of London, the Stamp family moved to the more genteel Plaistow - where Terence attended grammar school before getting the first of a series of jobs in advertising his autobiography, Stamp Album, he recalled how he loved the life, but he could not shake off the feeling he wanted to be an actor. Having been turned down for National Service because of problems with his feet, he won a scholarship to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art - which got rid of his cockney completing his studies, he set out on the grinding local repertory circuit that was the training ground for all aspiring actors in the one occasion, he found himself in a touring production of The Long and the Short and the Tall alongside another budding actor named Michael Caine, with whom he would later share a leap to stardom came when he was cast in the title role of a 1962 film, Billy Budd, based on the Herman Melville novella. His performance as the naïve young seaman, hanged for killing an officer in self-defence, won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe for Best Newcomer. In the same year, he appeared in Term of Trial alongside Laurence was hailed as one of the new wave of actors from working-class backgrounds, such as Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, who were also making a name for 1965, Stamp starred in an adaptation of the John Fowles novel The Collector, as the repressed Frederick Clegg who kidnaps a girl and imprisons her in his now, he was regularly seen at the most fashionable 1960's gatherings, and his good looks brought him plenty of female was a relationship with the actress Julie Christie, who he'd approached after seeing her holding a gun on a magazine cover in affair only lasted a year, but was later immortalised by the Kinks in the song Waterloo Sunset: with a line referencing Terry and Julie crossing over the river. He turned down the chance to star in Alfie, having played the part on stage. His flatmate, Michael Caine, took the role instead and it launched his 1966, Stamp appeared as Willie Garvin - a rough Cockney diamond - in the film version of Peter O'Donnell's comic strip, Modesty a year later, he starred as a bank-robber-with-a-soft-heart in Ken Loach's kitchen sink drama, Poor found Loach difficult. The director, he felt, was too political and hid the script from the cast - preferring to feed them lines while shooting each scene."Before a take, he'd say something to (co-star Carol White)," he complained, "and then he would say something to me, and we only discovered once the camera was rolling that he'd given us completely different directions. That's why he needed two cameras, because he needed the confusion and the spontaneity." He was reunited with Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd. He was dating Jean Shrimpton by then, but their on-screen chemistry was still evident."On the set, the fact that she had been my girlfriend just never came up," he told The Guardian 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."With cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, Stamp helped choreograph the famous fencing demonstration scene: in which Sergeant Troy's sword skills captivate - and eventually seduce - Bathsheba the film got poor reviews and failed at the box office. And Stamp fell out with the director, John Schlesinger."He didn't strike me as a guy who was particularly interested in film," the actor recalled. "Plus I wasn't his first choice: he really wanted Jon Voight." But Stamp's star was beginning to fade. An outing in Blue - a "pretentious, self-conscious, literary Western without much zest", according to one critic - didn't help. He was approached to play James Bond when Sean Connery relinquished the role, but his radical ideas of how he should interpret the character did not impress producer Harry suggested that he might start a Bond film disguised as a Japanese warrior - and slowly reveal himself to be 007."I think my ideas about it put the frighteners on Harry," he speculated. "I didn't get a second call from him." There was a spell in Italy where he worked with the directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini but, by the time he returned to London, the 60s were drawing to a close and he was no longer in fashion."When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: 'They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp.'" He was still only he bought a round-the-world ticket and found himself in India - experimenting with vegetarianism, yoga and living in a spiritual was there, in 1976, that he received a message addressed to 'Clarence' Stamp, offering him the part of General Zod in Superman. With his leading man days behind him, Stamp discovered that playing villains was and the sequel, Superman II, put him firmly back on the public stage - and he appeared in a bewildering variety of genres. There were Westerns like Young Guns, crime dramas like The Hit and The Real McCoy - and even a gothic thriller in Neil Jordan's fantasy, The Company of his most unlikely - and celebrated - performance was as transgender woman in the Australian film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in was not keen to do the film - in fact, he thought the initial offer was a a female friend persuaded him to take the part - which saw his character journey across the outback with two drag queens, played by Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce."It was a challenge, a challenge I couldn't resist because otherwise my life would have been a lie", said Stamp. Over the next 10 years, Stamp appeared in two dozen films - playing a wide variety of 1999, he entered the Star Wars canon: playing a politician battling corruption in Episode I: the Phantom Menace - an experience he later described as "dull".More satisfyingly, he starred in The Limey: as a career English criminal hunting for his missing daughter.A decade later, he was nominated for a Bafta for his role as the grumpy husband of a dying woman in A Song for 2002, he married for the first time at the age of had met Elizabeth O'Rourke in a chemist shop in Australia. She was 35 years younger, and the marriage lasted six years. Terence Stamp continued to act well into his parts - like his fleeting appearance as a silver-haired gentleman in Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho in 2021 - grew smaller, although a sequel to Priscilla was in will be remembered as the actor who blazed like a comet at the height of the 1960s, surrounded by the decade's most beautiful career fizzled close to extinction, but he showed an impressive ability to reinvent himself - with his ability to project style and menace bringing him to the attention of new was a career that unfolded with no thought of planning, no clear strategy and no goal in mind. "I don't have any ambitions," Stamp once said. "I'm always amazed there's another job." "I've done crap, because sometimes I didn't have the rent. But when I've got the rent, I want to do the best I can."
The Guardian
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rare original proof of David Bailey's 1965 Box of Pin-Ups discovered
David Bailey's Box of Pin-Ups of 1965 was a defining portrait of the swinging 60s, immortalising some of the most fashionable stars of the era, from John Lennon and Mick Jagger to Jean Shrimpton and Susan Murray. Now the original proof copy of this landmark portfolio of 36 portraits by one of Britain's foremost photographers has come to light for the first time. It is the personal working proof copy of David Hillman, the influential graphic designer who went on to give the Guardian a groundbreaking redesign in 1988. In 1965, Hillman co-conceived the Box of Pin-Ups with the magazine editor and political cartoonist Mark Boxer. This copy, in near-mint condition, was the finished concept presented to Bailey for final approval before printing. Its existence was unknown until now, having remained in Hillman's private collection. In an accompanying signed letter confirming its authenticity, he writes: 'Mark, a friend of David Bailey's, came up with the idea for a box of pin-ups – an idea Bailey was enthusiastic about. Bailey selected the photographs, and Mark tasked me with designing and managing the project under his direction.' The edition, a loose portfolio within a box, was published originally in 1965 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Plans for a second edition were dropped after Lord Snowdon – a distinguished photographer and sitter in the box, and Princess Margaret's husband – objected to its inclusion of the Kray twins, the notorious East End gangsters. The controversy of glamorising criminals reportedly cancelled plans for a US edition. The first edition is so sought-after by collectors that copies have sold for about £20,000, although one example, in which every portrait had been signed by Bailey, far exceeded that. This unique proof is priced at £25,000 and is being offered for sale by Bayliss Rare Books in London on the 60th anniversary of its publication. Oliver Bayliss, its founding director, told the Guardian: 'Box of Pin-Ups is one of the most iconic photography collections of the 20th century, but until now no one knew this original proof existed. 'What makes it so fascinating is that this isn't just a production copy or a variant. It is the prototype – the moment Bailey's concept became a finished object. And it comes from Hillman, one of the great British designers of the postwar period, whose role in shaping this work has often been overshadowed by the fame of the images themselves. 'It's an incredibly rare item … Proof copies are always sought after in the rare book trade. But generally, with something like this, a proof wouldn't have been thought to exist. It is incredible.' Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Referring to the Krays, he said: 'While the controversy tarnished the project's reception in some circles, it paradoxically amplified its allure in others, cementing its rebellious edge.' The portfolio's other famous sitters included the actor Michael Caine, the hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, the dancer Rudolf Nureyev and the artist David Hockney. Bayliss said: 'The 1960s were a time of radical change in every sense, and Bailey's portraiture was a striking departure from the more formal styles that had come before. His work was wonderfully informal, something we now take for granted but, at the time, it was groundbreaking. Bailey had, and still has, an uncanny ability to capture the personality of his sitters, not just their appearance. With the rise of celebrity culture in the 1960s, Box of Pin-Ups became a defining record of the era's most iconic figures and their characters.' He added: 'I'd say half [the sitters] are still very well-known names, and half have fallen by the wayside. The model Susan Murray is among those whose star has since faded.' Only four of the 36 sitters are women – and all of those are models. In the collection's notes, Francis Wyndham wrote: 'In the age of Mick Jagger, it is the boys who are the pin-ups.'
