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.”
Not long after that, Mr. Stamp largely disappeared for almost a decade. He came back as a character actor. When he made his entrance in Richard Donner’s “Superman II” (1980), boldly crashing through a White House roof, audiences saw the young man who had been called the face of the ’60s, now with a seriously receding hairline, devilish facial hair and a newly mature persona. His character, Zod, an alien supervillain with a burning desire to rule the world, also appeared in the first “Superman” movie.
Mr. Stamp had a busy career for the next half-century, perhaps most memorably in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (1994), with yet another new on-screen look. His character, Bernadette, a middle-aged transgender woman, wore dangly earrings, a grayish-blond pageboy, tasteful neutrals and not quite enough makeup to hide the age lines.
“I’ve got a kind of more developed feminine side of my nature,” he said in 2019 when asked about the role in a Reuters interview, “so it was a chance to knowingly explore that.”
“I had to think about what it would be like to be born into the wrong body,” he added, “and born into a body that wasn’t the same as one’s emotions.”
Terence Henry Stamp was born on July 22, 1938, in London, one of five children of Thomas Stamp, a tugboat stoker with the Merchant Navy, and Ethel (Perrott) Stamp.
In the low-income neighborhoods of the East End where the Stamps lived, expectations were low. “When I asked for career guidance at school, they recommended bricklaying as a good, regular job,” Mr. Stamp recalled in a 2011 interview with the Irish newspaper The Sunday Business Post, “although someone did think I might make a good Woolworths’ manager.”
After leaving school, Mr. Stamp worked in advertising agencies, but he secretly wanted to become an actor and began lessons at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
“Billy Budd” is usually referred to as his first film, but in England, “Term of Trial,” in which he appeared as a young tough alongside Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret, was released a month earlier. (In the United States, “Billy Budd” opened first.)
He did theater work in England but had only one Broadway experience — a disaster. He played the title role in “Alfie!,” a play about a callous young South London bachelor, which opened in December 1964 and closed three weeks later. Shawn Levy, in his book “Ready, Steady, Go!,” had an explanation: “It was so dark and frank and mean and true and generally disharmonious with the optimistic, up-tempo tenor of the moment.”
But moments pass. Mr. Stamp turned down the same role in the 1966 film version, and Michael Caine — who happened to be his flatmate — took it instead. It made him a star.
Mr. Stamp did star in “Modesty Blaise” (1966), as a secret agent’s Cockney sidekick; Ken Loach’s “Poor Cow” (1967), as a sensitive working-class guy; and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Theorem” (1968), as a mysterious stranger who beds every single member of a household, including the maid. Federico Fellini directed him as a self-destructive, alcoholic actor in “Spirits of the Dead” (1968).
In 1969, Mr. Stamp moved to an ashram in India and became a swami. Some said it was because of a romantic breakup, but he professed a simpler motive: He couldn’t find work. Although he was barely in his 30s, casting agents were already looking for “a young Terence Stamp.”
Around eight years later, he received a message from his agent about the “Superman” movie. He accepted, he often said, because he wanted to work with Marlon Brando, who played Jor-El, Superman’s father.
Between 1978 and 2019, Mr. Stamp appeared in more than 50 films. He received particular praise for Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999), in which he played an ex-con on the trail of a drug-trafficking record producer (Peter Fonda) as he avenges his daughter’s death.
He also had roles in “Legal Eagles” (1986), “Wall Street” (1987), “Young Guns” (1988), “Alien Nation” (1988), and “Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace” (1999), as chancellor of the Galactic Republic. In “Unfinished Song” (2012, originally “Song for Marion”), he played a gruff pensioner with a dying wife (Vanessa Redgrave). After having been a Superman-franchise villain, Mr. Stamp was the voice of the superhero’s noble Kryptonian father in the television series “Smallville.”
His final film was the horror thriller “Last Night in Soho” (2021). A Times review called his entrance alone “a master class in minimalist menace.”
In the 1960s, Mr. Stamp had highly publicized romances with the British supermodel Jean Shrimpton and with Ms. Christie. In 2002, at age 64, he married Elizabeth O’Rourke, a 29-year-old Australian pharmacist; they divorced in 2008.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Looking back philosophically in 2017 on his life’s ups and downs, Mr. Stamp told The Telegraph, “The thing that has been constant is that from the very beginning I always seemed to be the opposite to everybody else.”
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