Terence Stamp, the magnetic British actor whose film roles included a naïve 18th-century merchant seaman in “Billy Budd,” a violent 19th-century swordsman in “Far From the Madding Crowd,” a tyrant from another planet in “Superman” and a transgender nightclub entertainer in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” died on Sunday. He was 87.
His family confirmed his death but did not specify where he died or the cause.
Mr. Stamp was a boyish 24 when “Billy Budd” (1962), based on Herman Melville’s seafaring novel, was released. He looked into the camera with what one journalist later called his “heartbreak blue eyes” and let his tousled blond hair fall over his forehead whenever his character was provoked — which was often, since he was being accused of murder.
And he could act: The role brought Mr. Stamp an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award for most promising newcomer.
He presented a very different image three years later, playing a dark-haired psychopath who loves butterflies but decides to move up to capturing humans in “The Collector” (1965).
As he carried a bottle of chloroform toward a beautiful art student (Samantha Eggar), those startlingly blue eyes now seemed terrifying. In The New York Herald Tribune, the critic Judith Crist called his performance “brilliant in its gauge” of madness. He received the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.
He grew a sinister black mustache to play the sadistic Sergeant Troy, who mistreats the heroine (Julie Christie) in “Far From the Madding Crowd” (1967), based on Thomas Hardy’s novel. Reviews were mixed, but Roger Ebert praised Mr. Stamp’s performance as “suitably vile.” Looking back in 2015, a writer for The Guardian observed, “Stamp has an animation and conviction in this role that he never equaled elsewhere.”
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