I was very saddened indeed to hear today of the passing of Terence Stamp. I met him just a few times, and certainly didn’t know him at all well. But like (it seems) all or most others who encountered him, I was utterly charmed by his down-to-earth demeanour, his quiet intelligence, his modesty, his warm manner and – let’s not forget it – his enduring beauty.
My first encounter with him was back in the late 1970s, when I was the manager of the Electric Cinema Club. We were putting on a rare matinee screening of Histoires Extraordinaires, including, of course, Fellini’s Toby Dammit (the actor’s favourite of his own films), and during my brief stint in the foyer’s box-office, I spotted Stamp, dressed rather improbably (but I imagine very expensively) in a long, drab grey overcoat, wandering up and down Portobello Road before he finally crossed the street to buy a ticket. We were a club cinema, so I insisted he sign up for and buy a year’s membership (50 pence!), partly so that we had proof of his having visited the place; he agreed to this immediately*. (We’d done the same for the likes of Diane Keaton, Jonathan Demme, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dustin Hoffman, Mark Hammill, Art Garfunkel, Sun Ra, Brian Eno and countless others, so why not Stamp?) I hope he enjoyed the screening despite the dodgy 35mm print; from what he told me years later, he tried to see the movie on the big screen whenever he could.
Not that much of an encounter, for sure, but around two decades later, I met him a couple of times more, thanks to the release of Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey. As editor of the film section of Time Out, having loved the movie at its Cannes premiere, I’d selected it for the magazine’s gala screening at the London Film Festival; Soderbergh and Ken Loach (clips from whose Poor Cow featured as flashbacks in The Limey) were present for the screening, but not Stamp, who if memory serves then divided his time between London and California. So I didn’t get to meet him again until a small dinner for the Dutch premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival and, later, an extended interview in London for Time Out’s coverage of the film’s UK release. Both provided ample evidence of the actor’s easy-going excellence as a raconteur. He loved his life, his career, his medium and the art of acting, and he loved talking about them, but he never appeared to speak down to anyone. Like some other fine British actors of working-class origins, he relished his unexpectedly luxurious existence but never took it for granted.
My next dealings with Stamp came in 2013 when, as programmer of BFI Southbank, I put together a small season of his work, which involved not only several discussions with him about which films to include in the tribute, but my hosting an on-stage interview about his career; I did this happily, knowing he was articulate as well as charismatic, and the audience were generous in expressing their appreciation of both qualities. Again, he spoke of the importance he attached to filmmakers he admired: he was an actor who loved cinema, perhaps, more than his own image. I suppose he knew that we were sufficiently appreciative of that image. Ray Davies had written memorably of Terry in Waterloo Sunset; Pasolini had cast him as an inexorably seductive divinity in Theorem; there are Billy Budd, Far from the Madding Crowd, Superman, The Hit, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and more. Though he is famous for a relatively small number of movies, he remained, perhaps, one of those actors who might properly be described as ‘iconic’.
Around the same time of the BFI retrospective, I hosted a Q&A with Stamp at the London Film Festival of Song for Marion. (Having taken up singing late in life, I can imagine the bravery required for Stamp’s lovely performance.) As always, he was fun to be with, pleasingly undemanding (if memory serves, he walked to the cinema rather than accepting the usual limo), and gave the audience very good value. Once again, I greatly enjoyed spending a little time with him. The charm of his smile was overwhelming, his words were… well, admirably sensible.
Stamp never forgot his East London background, never forgot his love of art; despite his widely acknowledged beauty, he appears never to have forgotten his humanity. I liked him a lot. RIP.
* Just days after writing this, I happened to meet up with my former boss at the Electric – Peter Howden, who taught me so very much about film programming – and as he recalled it, it was he who was filling in at the box office when Stamp finally came over to buy a ticket. (He remembered the actor carrying a jar of honey, which I didn’t, so that may clinch it.) No matter (either of us may have been right or wrong) but we both recalled Stamp’s long drab coat, his pacing up and down Portobello and, most importantly, his evident need or desire to see Toby Dammit again; this was, after all, before VHS, let alone DVD, BluRay and streaming.
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 