There are a lot of great stories about Terence Stamp, and some of them are even true.
Not, however, that he and flatmate Michael Caine once lived in a former bordello. "It was only decorated like a bordello," corrects Stamp. "It was very nice, actually. But then Mike always liked a nice address. He continually took places we couldn't afford."
Or that Caine almost never got his break in "Alfie," because he tried to convince Stamp to take the part. "No," Stamp says flatly. "I'd never considered doing the film because I'd already done the play in New York -- to empty houses. Although his is a much better story."
Or that, at the height of his fame, Stamp simply walked from it all to go sit cross-legged in an ashram.
"Au contraire," says Stamp, 74. Although he did spend almost eight years studying Eastern philosophy, meditation and yoga, "I didn't take any time off from films," he says. "They took time off from me. I simply couldn't get a job."
But the rest of it? The tough-as-nails upbringing in London's East End? The sudden rocket to fame with "Billy Budd"? The swinging '60s -- when Stamp and girlfriend Julie Christie were namechecked in the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset," and Stamp's brother Chris managed the Who?
All true.
As are the details about Stamp's long professional eclipse, his surprising return to acting in the "Superman" films (sorry, Michael Shannon, but this is the real General Zod) and his still busy career.
Stamp's latest is a little movie called "Unfinished Song," which pairs him with another blue-eyed '60s icon, Vanessa Redgrave, as a couple of English pensioners.
They're devoted to each other -- but she's also devoted to a local choir group, a pastime he quite actively loathes. Until he finds himself joining it -- and opening up.
"I approached it with trepidation, because these twin souls, Arthur and Marion, they're very ordinary," Stamp says, sitting in the lounge at Gordon Ramsay's posh Manhattan restaurant. "And ordinary isn't something I do very well."
But then Stamp started thinking about this blunt, brusque man who loved his wife but couldn't say it, who loved his son but couldn't show it. And he thought of his own father.
"That's who I ended up basing him on," Stamp says. "He worshipped my mother, but he'd never tell her, you know? He brought his pay home, what else was there to say? I don't remember him ever hugging me. I don't remember him ever touching any of us. But then, he went into the Merchant Navy when he was 15, as a stoker, and you know, those men -- you didn't show emotion. That was considered a bit flash."
While his father was at sea, Stamp and his mother occasionally treated themselves to the picture show. Stamp saw "Beau Geste," and wanted to be Gary Cooper. Later, he saw "Rebel Without a Cause," and "The Wild One," and realized he didn't just want to be James Dean, or Marlon Brando. He wanted to act.
"I could feel a change in direction of my life path," says Stamp -- whose conversation still shows traces of his years at that ashram. "I began to prepare myself to make that leap."
The family had grown to five boys by now, and when father was home everyone would crowd around the tiny television. Stamp, whose confidence was growing, would offer a running commentary on the performances, and how he'd have improved on them.
"My father said nothing the first couple of nights," Stamp remembers. "And then finally he said, 'Son, people like us don't do things like that.' And I went to object and he said, 'Son, I don't want you talk about this any more.' And I couldn't go against him, not in his own house. But I realized I had to plan my escape."
A breakout role
It was hard, and even after he found a full drama school scholarship ("which was a miracle"), the hard times didn't suddenly end.
"I was still hungry a lot," he says. "The rumor amongst the girls was that Terry would go with anybody for a bowl of soup, which wasn't exactly untrue. But I was used to being hungry -- my dad never earned more than 12 quid a week. And, slowly, I began to get work. I began to feel I was swimming with the tide."
The tide became a tidal wave with "Billy Budd," Stamp's first film, in which Peter Ustinov cast him as a saintly sailor. With his cut-crystal cheekbones, striking eyes and slippery sexual appeal, Stamp was a sensation (and a surprise Oscar nominee). "The camera was my girl on that film," he says. "The way I was photographed, the way I was lit -- I knew I was never going to be that good-looking again."
But more than making him a star, that film -- and its director -- taught him how to be an actor, he says. And a man.
"Peter Ustinov was a genius, but he was also a great man," Stamp says. "He and his wife befriended me, and protected me in some ways. And he showed me the way in which a great man conducts himself. And I became a good pupil."
And the strongest lesson Stamp learned -- and the costliest one -- was to wait.
"The very last day, Peter said to me, 'Look, I think we've done something special here, and when it comes out, people are going to try to commercialize it,'" Stamp says. "And he told me, 'Just be careful. Do good things. If you do good things, good things will come to you.' And I took that to heart." He laughs. "Maybe too much to heart, because I didn't work for 18 months."
Careful about career
Which is the singular thing in Stamp's career. All his other contemporaries -- all the other rough-and-tumble Welsh and Irish and Cockney actors who were remaking British film in the '60s -- eventually took the money, and the plane ticket, and went to Hollywood to make big overstuffed entertainments.
Not Stamp.
Instead he did "The Collector," "Modesty Blaise" and "Far From the Madding Crowd." He worked with directors like William Wyler, Joseph Losey and John Schlesinger. He went to Italy to make films with Fellini and Pasolini.
He still had a bloody good time in '60s London. How could you not, when you had fame and good looks and money, when your brother was recording Jimi Hendrix and you were dating Brigitte Bardot, Jean Shrimpton and Christie -- inspiring the "Terry" and "Julie" of Ray Davies' classic "Waterloo Sunset"?
"I heard he's going around now saying it wasn't about us at all, but I know it is," Stamp says. "Because Ray told my brother, and my brother told me. But, ah well, people have different recollections."
Yet, fun as the discotheques and parties were, Stamp drew most of his joy from "what I think of as the 'is-ness' of acting," he says. "It wasn't about the money. I mean, I wasn't stupid. But I knew if this was going to be a lifelong art, I had to stay close to the love I felt for it, the is-ness of it, the is-ness of performing."
So, just as he'd carefully planned his leap into the profession, he now prepared himself for the long haul -- carefully picking his projects, avoiding the excesses that had ruined other careers. And then something Stamp hadn't planned happened. His career ended.
"I genuinely don't know why," he says softly. "I assume, in retrospect, it's because I was so heavily identified with the '60s that when the '60s ended I did, too. I'd hear, 'Sorry, they're looking for a young Terence Stamp.' 'Bloody hell, I'm only 30, I'm still a young Terence Stamp!' But I couldn't get arrested. I did odd things, crap really. I started to travel, just to avoid the misery of the phone not ringing."
What began as a distraction turned into a detour, as Stamp ended up spending years in India with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
"I went back to being a pupil," he says. "I learned interesting things. I increased my knowledge of breath and exercise, and I thought, well, if the call ever comes, I'm going to be ready. Then so much time passed, the training became something in itself. I just worked on myself as a person. ... But when a proper job did finally come, I was ready."
A return to movies
The job was playing General Zod in "Superman" and "Superman II" (originally meant to be one epic, but then split in two by the hungry studio). It was campy action, costumes and sci-fi special effects. It was playing the comic-book bad guy. It was a long way from "Billy Budd." But Stamp accepted that.
"I knew they were trying to make me look as hideous as possible with the makeup and the costume," Stamp says. "And I thought, they wouldn't ask Robert Redford to play General Zod. They wouldn't ask Warren Beatty to play General Zod. But that was all right. Because a lot had happened during my years in the wilderness, and one of the things was that I'd accepted that things had changed. I was a character actor now."
Slowly, Stamp's career began again. There were small, good parts in films like "Wall Street." There were less good parts in the sort of films you notice in a list of credits and, Stamp jokes, "You say, 'Ah, he had to pay the rent that month!'" There were the rare, great leads, as in Steven Soderbergh's "The Limey," playing a remorseless avenger. ("He's a minimalist, Steven is," Stamp says. "So spare, so elegant. Not a wasted moment.")
And, as his career continues, so does Stamp's real life's work: Of knowing himself. Of being honest with himself. Of never becoming the closed-off person that his father was.
And sometimes those lessons come with the challenge of a new part. Sometimes they even come courtesy of a six-foot Aussie transsexual called Bernadette.
"That part (in 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert') was so frightening," Stamp says. "It must have been, because I kept finding reasons to say no. ... But I had a friend, an actress, a very considerable woman named Caroline Bliss, and she told me, 'Just say yes. Just say yes, because the fear you obviously have about doing this role is far more damaging than any consequences of doing it.'"
So, Stamp said yes.
"And suddenly I'm in broken heels and dressed up as a woman -- which is not for wimps, believe me -- standing on a bar table," he says. "And my mind is saying, Why on earth are you doing this, you're a middle-aged man, you're a serious actor, you're the best-dressed man in England. And here you are in the Australian outback in a frock. But I'd done it, I'd faced my fear. I'd faced something, learned something about myself. I had grown, and not just as an actor, but as a man. And then the director yelled 'Action' and I started to sing."
-- Stephen Whitty