TERENCE STAMP
(22 July 1938 – 17 August 2025)
Terence Stamp, who has died aged 87, had a varied film career that lasted some sixty years. In spite of an impressive and varied filmography, it is likely that the actor will be best remembered as General Zod, the Kryptonian archvillain in the Superman films from 1978. The DC Comics character in the original stories was bald and clean-shaven. However, such was the strength of Stamp’s performance – in which he sported black hair and a goatee – that the DC company adopted the same look in future publications. This is how Stamp’s fans will remember him – and such is the power of popular culture.
Terence Henry Stamp was born in Stepney, east London, to a tugboat stoker. He was the eldest of five children and the family lived in Bow until they moved to West Ham. The father was often away with the Merchant Navy, so Terence and his siblings were brought up by his mother and other female relatives. It is said that Gary Cooper and James Dean were both idols of young Terence, perhaps as all three shared a certain inscrutability of manner.
In the 1960s Stamp attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and worked in rep when he joined a tour of Willis Hall’s play The Long and the Short and the Tall (1959) in which fellow East Ender Michael Caine was a cast member. They shared a flat and he got to know other young British actors like Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris. In 1962 Stamp was lucky enough to get the title role of Billy Budd in Peter Ustinov’s film adaptation of the Herman Melville novel. Of the four actors mentioned here, Stamp was the most innocent-looking, a young boy with his dyed-blonde curls and virtuous appearance. The role earned him an Academy Award nomination, a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer, and a Bafta nomination. The same year saw him in Term of Trial, Peter Glenville’s drama about a sad schoolteacher (Laurence Olivier) who is hounded by everyone, including his wife (Simone Signoret) and Terence Stamp’s school bully.
Stamp then did some stage work including Bill Naughton’s Alfie on Broadway, the film of which subsequently went to Michael Caine. Back in the cinema, Stamp was cast by director William Wyler for the title role of The Collector (1965), from John Fowles’ novel about a meek bank clerk who kidnaps a student (Samantha Eggar) and keeps her prisoner in the basement of his farmhouse. This part of Freddie, which won him a best actor award at Cannes, suited Stamp very well as he was generally not cast in straightforward heroic roles, as he was a much more interesting actor. This is borne out by some of the future parts Stamp was to play. A case in point would be Willie Garvin, the Cockney sidekick to Modesty Blaise, international criminal, played by Monica Vitti in Joseph Losey’s camply pop art version of the famous cartoon strip. However, even with Dirk Bogarde also camping it up, the film did not really appeal.
The actor continued to land unusual parts, including Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, the working-class drama, in the role of an innocent but suspected robber, the boyfriend of Carol White as a barmaid-cum-prostitute. Then he played Sergeant Troy in John Schlesinger’s Thomas Hardy adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). He was one of three men pursuing the hand of Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie), the others being Peter Finch and Alan Bates. With music by Richard Rodney Bennett, it proved to be a satisfyingly pastoral epic. It also led to a relationship between Stamp and Christie. Fellini cast him as Toby Dammit in one of three horror stories called Spirits of the Dead, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem in the same year (1968) was one of the best films of Stamp’s career. He played a Christ-like figure who visits and seduces all the members of a bourgeois Italian family who for various reasons are unhappy. He comforts and seduces the father, the mother, the daughter, the son and even the maid. It was an astonishing film and Stamp was amazing in it.
Then, in 1978, Stamp finally got to play General Zod in Richard Donner’s Superman and its sequel, Superman II (1980). It probably says a lot for Stamp’s talent that his performance is more memorable than that of Marlon Brando, who was top-billed as Jor-El. The initial two films were fine, but as the series progressed, they lost the spark which only now, in 2025, has been reignited.
Other films of note included Stephen Frears’ crime thriller The Hit (1984) with John Hurt and Tim Roth, Neil Jordan’s fantasy horror The Company of Wolves with Angela Lansbury, Ivan Reitman’s Legal Eagles with Robert Redford, Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street with Michael Douglas, and, of course The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in which he played a transgender drag queen – very brave and hilariously funny and very touching, too. This was certainly a memorable performance which brought him best actor nominations at Bafta and the Golden Globes.
Next came another professional high in which he played a career criminal in Steven Soderbergh’s critically celebrated The Limey (1999), for which he walked away with a Golden Satellite Award. He was also in Soderbergh’s Full Frontal (2002), playing himself, a satire on Hollywood with David Duchovny and Julia Roberts, which bombed. He had another guest shot in George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace (1999) as Supreme Chancellor Finis Valorum, and he continued to remain busy in Paul Andrew Williams’ Song for Marion opposite Vanessa Redgrave (voted best actor at the Beijing International Film Festival), Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (as the art critic John Canaday), Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho (2021) with Anya Taylor-Joy, his last film.
Apart from relationships with Julie Christie and the supermodel Jean Shrimpton, Terence Stamp was married only once, to the pharmacologist Elizabeth O’Rourke, who he met in Australia. They married in 2002 and divorced in 2008. He also wrote a novel called The Night, a cookbook co-authored with Elizabeth Buxton, aimed at readers with a wheat and lactose intolerance, plus three volumes of autobiography including Stamp Album, a tribute to his mother.
MICHAEL DARVELL