British actor Terence Stamp, whose career spanned both avant-garde cinema and Hollywood blockbusters, has died at the age of 87. Known for his magnetic presence, he defined an era of 1960s stardom before reinventing himself in bold, genre-defying roles.
The London actor from a working-class background, born on July 22, 1938, had his first breakthrough in Peter Ustinov's Billy Budd.
His performance as a dashing young sailor hanged for killing one of his crewmates earned him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Best New Actor.
Carving out a niche for his alluring depictions of brooding villains, he won Best Actor at Cannes in 1965 for The Collector, a twisted love story adapted by William Wyler from John Fowles's bestselling novel.
His 1967 encounter with Federico Fellini was transformative. The Italian director was searching for the "most decadent English actor" for his segment in an adaptation of Spirits of the Dead, a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories.
Fellini cast him as Toby Dammit, a drunken actor seduced by the devil in the guise of a little girl.
Another Italian great, Pier Paolo Pasolini, who cast him in the cult classic Theorem, saw him as a "boy of divine nature." In the 1969 film, Stamp played an enigmatic visitor who seduced an entire bourgeois Milanese family.
‘Kneel before Zod!’
He also had a relationship with Jean Shrimpton — a model and beauty of the sixties — before she left him towards the end of the decade.
"I was so closely identified with the 1960s that when that era ended, I was finished with it," he once told French daily Libération.
But the dry spell did not last long. Stamp revived his career for some of his most popular roles, including in 1980's Superman II, as Superman's arch-nemesis General Zod.
His famous line from that film, "Kneel before Zod!" was spreading online in social media tributes after the news broke of his death.
Other roles followed, including that of Bernadette, a transgender woman in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), in which Stamp continued his exploration of human ambiguity, this time in fishnet stockings.
He continued to pursue a wide-ranging career, jumping between big-budget productions such as his villain’s role in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace to independent films like Stephen Frears's The Hit.
Stamp lent his magnetic presence to more than 60 films during a career that spanned genres and decades.
"He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, both as an actor and as a writer that will continue to touch and inspire people for years to come," UK media quoted his family as saying.
With AFP
Comments