Terence Stamp, whose seven decades of screen work spanned blockbusters, political dramas and psychological horror, has died at the age of 87. The New York Times noted that Stamp’s family confirmed his death; in his obituary, Anita Gates described Stamp’s screen presence as “magnetic.”
Stamp could play sympathetic characters; you don’t get cast as Billy Budd, as Stamp did early in his screen career, without the ability to evoke empathy from an audience. Over 30 years later, he’d win acclaim for a very different role, playing a trans woman in 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. That performance, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award.
That performance also served as a reminder of his range as an actor; not long afterward, he starred in the neo-noir film The Limey, which repurposed footage from director Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, juxtaposing the middle-aged Stamp with his younger self. (That said, few actors have aged quite as well as Stamp, who was a physically striking screen presence throughout his career.) The same year that film was released, Stamp demonstrated his range by also appearing as a cult leader in Bowfinger and a embattled politician in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
Stamp had stunning range, making him a good fit for both somber dramas and screwball comedies. And there’s also this moment from The Limey, in which Stamp (and director Steven Soderbergh) remind audiences that he could be absolutely, positively terrifying on screen.
A generation of viewers likely knows Stamp best from his work as General Zod in the Christopher Reeve Superman films. And that wasn’t the only time he brought an air of menace to his work. His third onscreen role, in the 1965 film adaptation of John Fowles’s novel The Collector, earned him the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival. (A recent episode of You Must Remember This featured some fascinating details about its production.) And in what appears to be his final film, 2021’s Last Night in Soho, captured a striking combination of foreboding and regret to his character.
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Including a trio of musical biographies along with some gripping fictionThere’s also the matter of his cameo as the Devil in director Neil Jordan’s 1984 The Company of Wolves. Jordan wasn’t the only talented director to cast Stamp in a critical role; Stamp’s filmography includes collaborations with John Schlesinger (Far From the Madding Crowd), Oliver Stone (Wall Street) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema). His was an extraordinary career, all the more striking for the ways in which it never stopped demonstrating Stamp’s range.
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