British actor Terence Stamp, who perfected the role of the brooding villain and starred in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”, has died aged 87, UK media cited his family announcing on Sunday.
“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,” media quoted the family saying.
From Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Theorem” to George Lucas’s “Star Wars”, the “swinging sixties” icon captivated audiences in both arthouse films and Hollywood with his magnetic presence, making more than 60 films during his genre-spanning career.
The London actor from a working-class background, born on July 22, 1938 had his first breakthrough in the role of a dashing young sailor hanged for killing one of his crewmates. Peter Ustinov’s “Billy Budd” earning him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Best New Actor.
Carving out a niche for his alluring depictions of broody villains, he won Best Actor at Cannes in 1965 for his role as a psychopathic character in “The Collector”, a twisted love story by William Wyler.
His 1967 encounter with Federico Fellini, who was searching for the “most decadent English actor” for his adaptation of “Extraordinary Stories”, was transformative.
The Italian director found his “Toby Dammit”, a drunken actor seduced by the devil in the guise of a little girl.
And Pasolini, who cast him in the cult classic “Theorem”, saw him as a “boy of divine nature”. In 1969, Stamp played an enigmatic visitor who seduced an entire bourgeois Milanese family.
He also had a relationship with Jean Shrimpton — model and beauty of the sixties — before she left him towards the end of the 1960s.
“I was so closely identified with the 1960s that when that era ended, I was finished with it,” he once told French daily Liberation.
But a dry spell did not last long, with Stamp reviving his career for some of his most popular roles, including in 1980’s “Superman II”, as Superman’s arch-nemesis General Zod.
Other roles followed, including that of Bernadette, a transgender woman in “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 like “Star Wars” and independent films like Stephen Frears’ “The Hit” and Ken Loach’s British drama “Poor Cow”.
aks/rmb
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