The beautiful otherworldiness of Terence Stamp

Terence Stamp, who died last week at the age of 87, was the essence of what the Sixties needed from a film star. Some actors are blessed with charm, others with craft.

Stamp had beauty. Not the approachable sort, but the sort that stops you in your tracks. His cheekbones and jaw seemed lifted from a Roman bust. His eyes were a pale, almost luminous blue. He seemed less like a promising young actor from Plaistow, east London, than a misplaced alien briefly visiting the human world.

If Michael Caine was the cheeky cockney lad and Albert Finney the northern bruiser, then Stamp was their otherworldly counterpart: aloof, aristocratic and unfathomable. He was the beautiful stranger, too immaculate for ordinary life and too reserved to ever be completely knowable.

The Sixties demanded icons fit for the age, and Stamp gave the screen precisely what it required. More than an actor, he was a presence that transcended any one role. His gift was simply to be – to exist on screen, to be a focus of fascination. This gift helped broaden British cinema especially, showing that beyond offering great storytelling, it could also be hip: a vehicle for cool and style.

Stamp was discovered by Peter Ustinov, who cast him in Billy Budd (1962). Here, Stamp’s angelic quality made him both innocent and doomed. Soon he was everywhere: photographed in Vogue, loved by Julie Christie, adored by Italian auteurs Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. As every pop musicologist knows, Ray Davies immortalised him in The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’: a hymn to London youth and fleeting grace, in which ‘Terry meets Julie’ and the city seems to revolve around their rendezvous.

Stamp’s defining role came in John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). As Sergeant Troy, he embodied suavity, threat and brute physical magnetism. The swordplay scene with Julie Christie remains one of the most erotically charged moments in British cinema, a performance that fused beauty with menace. It was the role that cemented his stardom, forever fixing his persona as that of the dangerous, alluring interloper.

The problem with being a demigod is that the mortal world moves on. As the Sixties gave way to the Seventies, Stamp’s unique persona began to seem out of time. The marble aloofness that vibed so perfectly with Sixties desires left him out of step in later decades, too cool to connect. Stamp worked abroad in Italy, where directors like Pasolini gave his brand of sensuality the right stage, as in Teorema (1968). Hollywood used him more warily, finding too much menace in his elegance. As General Zod in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980) he was unforgettable – but as a tyrant rather than an angel.

His later work proved he could surprise. In Stephen Frears’s The Hit (1984), he was a gangster awaiting death with eerie serenity. In The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), he was Bernadette, a transwoman played with rare dignity – and with the kind of stillness only a star who had never needed to beg for attention could command. In Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999), a revenge story in which his weathered face told of decades lived in exile, he delivered perhaps his great late performance. The outsider had endured: scarred now, but still magnetic, and still separate.

As Stamp aged, his aura aged with him. Where once he embodied the promise of youth, he later came to represent its passing. Fans who had grown up idolising him recognised the meaning of this changing iconography and used it. Morrissey used a movie still of a young Stamp playing a psychopath in The Collector (1965) on a Smiths record sleeve, deliberately evoking both innocent nostalgia and creepiness. Edgar Wright cast him in Last Night in Soho (2021), a retro horror steeped in the mythology of Swinging London. It was Stamp’s last role – a shadow of the myth that made him.

Through everything, the singular charisma of Stamp’s screen persona endured, unchanged. He was never ordinary or reassuring, and never entirely of this world. He was a man who could be named in a pop song, photographed like a model, adored by Europe’s great auteurs and still be a mystery. Unlike Michael Caine, who became part of the British furniture, Stamp remained a cypher. A reminder of a lost era.

Watching him, one sees distilled into a single figure the glamour and the melancholy of the Sixties – the young man on Waterloo Bridge who seemed to embody the promise of a new world, and who at the same time never quite left it.

Alex Dale and Maren Thom are co-hosts of the Performance Anxiety podcast.