By all rights, Terence Stamp probably should've died sometime around 1968. A rakishly handsome, peerlessly dapper leading man on the rise in swinging London, with laser blue eyes visible from across the pond and a smoldering onscreen intensity, he should've drank and smoked and screwed his way into oblivion. But a funny thing happened on the way to celebrity cliché. Two things, actually. First, Stamp decided he wanted to be in the movie business for a long, long time. And then, out of nowhere, after a brief, splendid run, the movie business decided it was done with Terence Stamp. The work dried up. The party moved on. He was crestfallen. But he was also equanimous: he persuaded himself that someday, maybe not for years, but someday, the phone would ring again. And no matter when it happened, no matter where he was, he would be ready.
I hear you do not have a permanent residence?
That's true.
When was the last time you had one?
The last time I had a permanent residence was about 12 years ago. I had a house in the Hamptons, and I sold it. After that I decided I'd sort of stay in hotels for a while. I didn't intend it to go on for as long, but you can get addicted to nice hotels.
Why does that lifestyle suit you?
My style is greater than my earning capacity, so when I see a place I'd really like to own, I'm always a million or two short. So I just haven't got around to buying anything. And I like the idea of wandering around. I mean, I miss having a home, but there's a great charm to just taking every day as it comes, which helped by the fact of not having a permanent base.
Does this way of life motivate you to stay busy and stay on the move?
When I realized that I could make my living performing, what I most desired from the business was a long career. And I spoke to you know some very heavy-hitting actors about that. Olivier said to me, 'You need to be an athlete.' That in order to have a really long career performing, you needed to be fit like an athlete. You had to look at your body like your machine. Cary Grant also told me to ercise. So I started by looking at the things I used, like the voice. I knew that Olivier had a very beautiful voice, and we spoke about that, and he said, 'You need to take care of that, because you can lose it just by not developing it.' So that led quite quickly to breath. I read somewhere that the young Sinatra used to swim to keep his breath full. I started doing breath ercises quite early, and I'd say I was sort of about 27, 28 when I got seriously into breathing.
Did that mean cutting out cigarettes, alcohol? Or at least moderating?
The truth is I was always a pretty cheap date as far as alcohol was concerned. I was one of those young guys who was like, merry, happy, headache, hangover, after the first full glass of wine. So I never really had to give up alcohol. It gave me up.
It's interesting to me that longevity was a value for you at such a young age, especially given the environment you were in—London in the 1960s. as a value at that age, surrounded by what you must have been surrounded by, I find interesting and probably unusual.
I understood from reading biographies of actors that I admired that the ones who had long careers had a lull. Either they had a lull at the beginning, or they had a lull in the middle, or they had a lull at the end. So when my star set at the end of the 1960s and I was out of work for eight years, I was psychologically prepared for it. It didn't really deter me. I was inspired by something I read about Muhammad Ali—that when he was banned for refusing the draft, he stayed ring-fit. Because he had the feeling that when the call came, he would have to be ready. I found that very inspiring, and in those years when I was out of work, I kept thinking, "The call will come, and I must stay in shape."
It seems as if one of the keys to having what you wanted as an actor was getting comfortable with it going away.
Yes, and also it gave me the opportunity to not be observed when I was moving from young leading man to character actor. I wasn't under a magnifying glass, you know. A lot of maturing happened when I was out of work and traveling. There was less temptation to become a caricature of myself.
I'm interested in that transition from young leading man to character actor. It doesn't often happen. Most leading men can't pull it off.
Listen, it's not something I would ever have chosen. It was very sad for me. There was enduring sadness when I realized that at the end of the '60s, I was sort of in my prime, really. I was in my early 30s, and that's the age when I thought I would be a leading man. I don't think any actor would really choose, if they'd been honest with themselves. When I have to do these junkets and I'm being interviewed by journalists around the world, I often get asked, 'Why did you retire so early?' Which is very romantic, but I'm afraid it wasn't like that at all. I don't know why it ended. There's no real reason why it ended. I think I was heavily identified with the era, and when the era finished, I ended with it. It wasn't of my choosing. But I just chose not to give up the ghost. I just chose to think, "So this is just a few months." And then it was a year, and I thought, "Well, this is a year…" In the back of my mind, there was this feeling that the call will come. And when the call comes, I want to be ready. I want to be able to just get on the plane. I was in America once, and I saw Arthur Ashe, the wonderful tennis player? I saw him at the airport, and he just had his racket. And I thought, how elegant is that, you know, "Have racket, will travel"? I thought, yeah, I can view myself like that: I'm a trained actor. I've spent my adult life investigating this. And so I'll keep myself in good shape. I'll be ring-fit.
And finally eight years later the call came?
When the call came, it was 1977, and I was in an ashram in India. Before I was given entry into the ashram, I had stayed in a hotel nearby called the Blue Diamond. It was an Indian hotel. And I must have sent my agent a postcard or something from the Blue Diamond. I don't remember mailing him, but I must have, because about a year later, I went back to the Blue Diamond for what they laughingly called a full English breakfast. You can imagine what it was like. And as I walked into the hotel, the concierge, who must have remembered me from when I first checked in—they're great cineastes in India—he said, 'Mr. Terence, there's a cable for you, sir.' And he handed me this dusty, dog-eared old telegram. He put it in my hand, and it was like it weighed a ton. You know what I mean? Like the psychic weight of this telegram was apparently immediately. I looked at the address, and it said, 'Clarence Stamp, the Rough Diamond Hotel, India.' I opened it, and it was from my long-suffering agent, this great Scottish agent called Jimmy Frasier. And it said, 'Would you be prepared to come back to London to talk to Richard Donner about a part in Superman? You have a scene with Marlon Brando.' And I thought, 'Wow, this is it. This is the call.' And so I took off. I came back.
Now, I don't remember a lot about the interim, but I remember the first day on the set of Superman, and I remember I had two conflicting emotions. One was that I was no longer a leading man, and nobody really knew who I was. And the other was that I felt just tremendously present, because all the stuff I had been doing at the ashram was about being aware when you were unaware, so to speak. So I just felt up for this, d'you know what I mean? I'll deal with not being a young film star. I'll deal with that, and I'll go with this other feeling.
How long do you think that telegram had been waiting for you?
Well, it could've been waiting for months. It was like a cosmic event that it wound up in my hands, especially as it was addressed to Clarence. And it didn't even have the right name of the hotel. So I was obviously destined to be in Superman. [laughs]
I assume you saw Brando on the set. You were friends with him, right? Was that the first time you'd seen him in years?
Yes. Brando is a bit like Fellini. He's like a flea. You have to kind of catch him when you're in town. I always called Marlon when I was in LA, but I only actually caught up with him a few times. But he was just one of the funniest guys in the world. I thought the world of him. That was the longest time we spent together, because we were together on the set for the whole 12 days.
I need to ask you about my favorite of your roles, which is The Limey. That was such a splendid role, and the way it made use of your performance in Poor Cow from so many years earlier—I wonder what you thought when Soderberg told you about it? How did that role begin for you?
I was on holiday in Hawaii with a girlfriend of mine, and we were in a hotel that didn't have telephones for guests. But my agent got a message through to this hotel to call Soderbergh at this 818 number in Los Angeles. I knew his work, I knew he was an incredibly accomplished young director. So I was very interested to call him. I got a load of nickels and dimes, and I went to one of those side-of-the-road telephones they have in Hawaii. And I put in all these coins and I called this number and within seconds, I was talking to Steven. And frankly, you know, I was just a jobbing actor at that time, so I was expecting a support role or a sort of villain. But then it became clear that he was actually thinking about me for The Limey. He said, 'I've seen this film that you made called Poor Cow, and I'm actually hoping to use some footage from that as a kind of a sort of background for the character, like when you were young thief kind of thing.' Then he didn't speak, and I thought maybe we'd been cut off or something. Then finally he said, 'Are you still there?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Well, do you think you'd like to do it?' And I said, 'YES!' I was thrilled. Thrilled. I couldn't believe he'd researched this whole movie—what it was saying to me was, my God, he wrote this for me! So I was tremendously flattered. And he said, 'Wow, that's fantastic.' And I said, 'What's fantastic?' And he said, 'I don't know many big actors who would agree to being up there with themselves 30 years previous, you know.' I said, 'Not me, man.' That was of the beginning of it. I'd put him up there with Wyler and Fellini, really. And the fact that he works his own camera—he's kind of the perfect director for me, really.
**Why do you say that? **
Because the camera's my girl. That I didn't have to learn. That was just something that was a gift to me, something that happened the first day I got on a film set. I had that rapport with the camera, and it didn't even have to be considered. It was just a given, really. And the fact that he worked the camera meant that virtually the whole movie was just one take.