Terence Stamp - Classic or Dud, Search and Destroy

Alright as General Zod in Superman II though.

And he single-handedly made Superman II in any way watchable. Plus he's on the cover of 'What Difference Does it Make?'.

CLASSIC!

You must be joking, the man's a plank. Still classic though.

Search: Charge of the Light Brigade and Far From the Madding Crowd - anything in the 60s where he appears opposite Julie Christie (including the Kinks' 'Waterloo Sunset')

I think we agreed about In The Mood For Love, Stevie.

Stamp does a lot of work in crappy movies, and he's not necessarily good enough to rise above them either. I think he freely admits to working for the money sometimes, much like Michael Caine.

Incidentally, he was cast in Teorema because Pasolini asked an English producer-friend to send him "Your most decadent actor."

I love the end of The Limey, when Soderbergh includes footage from Poor Cow.

Terence plays Ashton's boss and is Tara Reid's father. When Ashton and Tara hook, apparently wacky hijinks ensue. Admittedly it hasn't been released yet, but I don't see there is any way this movie could be anything but atrocious.

You know the worst thing about that movie? I heard Ashton Kutcher on tv saying "This movie is exactly like Bringing Up Baby". There are so many things wrong with that sentence I don't even know where to begin.

Utter class for living at Albany on Piccadilly on the proceeds of his wheat-intolerace-friendly food products empire.

I used to wonder what would happen if Zod met Freddie Mercury for the proverbial duel at dawn.

http://www.i-mockery.com/generalzod/media/zod-scowl.jpg

This, and Terence Stamp is H.O.T. I don't really care how bad of an actor he is. He's on fire. Therefore, classic.

Yes! I even have a paperback edition of the book that came out around the same time with Terence Stamp on the cover. It's not the greatest film but it's definitely worth seeing just for a few peak moments. I think it was all shot in Afghanistan and there are some pretty amazing scenes. There's an awesome musical/mystical competition in a big canyon, lots of weird questing around for maps and stuff, crazy hypnotic formation dancing, etc.

This is one of my favorites of Fellini's work. Totally classic. Terence Stamp is great as is the creepy little devil girl who was ripped off for "The Ring" and others.

And fuck the hate. General Zod is a tremendously scary mofo.

Destroy: narration on stupid BBC Stalinist historical rewriting exercise Jazz Britannia.

But the song also becomes more powerful when you realise that the song's actually about this sad old (pervy?) voyeur who's got nothing better to do than stare out of his tower block window all day. Lyrically it's also a nice follow-on from "See My Friends" - he's gone across the river but his friends have vanished/moved on ("i don't need no friends" he sings, without quite convincing us) - there's the contrast between his idea of paradise (bereft of life) with that of the people he's watching (who actually do have a life). But Davies doesn't condemn or pity; he just records and observes.

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

x posts

as Billy Budd, he just seems to be offering his cheekbones to the camera for awhile, but is actually an affecting victim/angel before it's over.

classic, if only for that show he did with david bowie.

why did i have this bookmarked?

trivia tidbit: his brother is Chris Stamp, the Who's co-manager (with Kit Lambert) from 1964-1972.

Liking – or not liking – his directors is one of Stamp’s big themes: joining Schlesinger on the naughty step are Ken Loach (“too political”), Joseph Losey (“no sense of humour”) and Pasolini (“didn’t talk to me”). On the plus side, though, are Fellini (“changed my life”), William Wyler (“really bonded with him”) and Burton (“a wonderful movie-maker”). Fraught though his on-set relationships may have been, Stamp says he never let it get to him. “I don’t have to get on with a director. What I’m concerned with is what goes into the camera.”

This, it seems, is something that didn’t extend to his Madding Crowd co-star, Christie, of whom he still speaks fondly and with a certain amount of awe. Their relationship – initiated after Stamp saw her on a magazine cover holding a submachine gun shortly after he’d shot to fame in 1962 with his first film lead, Billy Budd – has become one of the 60s most mythologised (not least because of the Terry-and-Julie namecheck on the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset).

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/12/terence-stamp-i-was-in-my-prime-but-when-the-60s-ended-i-ended-with-it

Nice article.

Classic! Love the Fellini film (and him in it) so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaAZX14x-4s

Also appears in Yvan Attal's "My Wife is an Actress" as Charlotte Gainsbourg's co-star crush: good casting.

he's otm about Schlesinger.

Kinda made sense for him to disappear after the roles dried up, like his character in Teorema.

Need to see Modesty Blaise.

otm about Schlesinger
Tend to agree, although still like Billy Liar

saw Far From the Madding Crowd maybe ten years ago, it's p good

How does it compare to The Go-Between?

not quite *that* good. tho the one time i saw TGB, the print was faded.

Schlesinger isn't in my pantheon or anything, but Day of the Locust and Sunday Bloody Sunday are significant '70s films.

billy liar and darling are both pretty good

Billy Liar now available as ebook from Valancourt Books.

SBS is accidental goodness.

I didn't mind Cold Comfort Farm either.

Completely forgot he did that.

Love this little BFI interview from a couple of years ago where he answers questions from the gen pub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXgGCwOOsEY

That was great, tx. Laughed out loud a couple of times, and the smirk at the end of the 'guilty pleasures' questions was good too - I interpret it as him thinking the notion is a load of crock but its not as if Stamp has spent anytime on ilx to be 'educated' on how the notion itself is a load of shit ;-)

Actually saw him talk when I saw the Richard Donner cut of Superman II (my impressions might have been on some other thread) but I loved his notion of film as a band of people who go from town to town (like a theatre company doing Shakespeare, or the circus) who show you something magical and go to the next town and so on. We are wasting our lives in front of the computer really..

Good to watch stoned..I like the way he emphasises each questioner's name.

Also lol- 'broke'..Living in the Albany and shopping at Fortnum and Masons...I guess it's all relative and compared to others in the great profession.

2.47 - his expression to illustrate 'this is a growth move' - is a good moment.

on General Zod: "I'll play this role as if I were still in the ashram."

I like the way he emphasises each questioner's name.

that was so cool..

I saw him do a Q&A once which I quite enjoyed and is briefly discussed here: The William Wyler Film Poll

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OMansVKVWRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMansVKVWRo

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/terence_stamp_being_nothingness_acting_and_the_devil

NYC retro next month

http://metrograph.com/series/series/145/terence-stamp

turned 80 yesterday

http://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/16370373.heres-what-actor-terence-stamp-talked-about-at-the-50th-annual-thomas-hardy-conference/

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a6/Sprad/HuMan-StampMoreau_zpsgywvfsly.png

ok i don't know that

there's a Bluray of Billy Budd on the way

Not having seen The Adventures of Priscila... since 1995, I'd forgotten everything about it...including that Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving are the fellow queens. They're fine, but Stamp is just sensational as a person in transition adjusting to hard knocks.

Seeing this bumped next to the obit thread scared me.

For those who haven't seen, The Limey leaves Prime at the end of the month.

I managed to avoid the Elder Scrolls games for years, but a chap on Youtube called Bacon_ finally persuaded me to pick up Oblivion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK26bXWrOvo

Terence Stamp is in it! He plays the chief baddy, Mankar Camoran, bad wizard and author of the Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes. In the game Camoran's base health is 35, with a bonus scaled to the player's level, which coincidentally is the same as Terence Stamp's actual health in real life. He is largely immune to magic, just like Terence Stamp. And also frost, again just like Terence Stamp.

To be honest he's awful. There's a making of video which reveals that the developers hired a professional studio in London and directed him as he recorded the script and made ARGH and URGH noises. So it wasn't just done over the phone. But I have the impression the developers were more interested in hiring actors for the name value than actually getting a good performance out of them, so Stamp sounds as if he's just reading the script. His role consists of two dialogue sequences and a long monologue where he just reads a script. Something about the planes of oblivion. He maintains that Tamriel is actually just another plane of oblivion, which is of course wrong.

The game has a really eclectic cast. It stars Patrick Stewart as Emperor Tiber Septim, who delivers a bit of dialogue in the beginning of the game and dies. His last line is something like "you must close the games... OF OBLIVION!", which is really hammy. It also has Sean Bean as a monk. He's genuinely good. I respect him even more. He's charismatic and sounds as if he believes all the stuff he says about Akatosh and the Nine Divines etc. Does he die? Does he die? I'm not going to say.

And it has Lynda Carter, who is in lots of games by Bethesda because she was married to Robert Altman! But not the director Robert Altman. She was married to a man called Robert Altman who co-founded Bethesda, a different Robert Altman. I mean, Sean Bean didn't die in Ronin. He doesn't die in everything. One day he will die in real life and his family will be "whatever".

Infamously the game has eight hundred voiced characters but only fifteen voice actors, of whom four - the stars - only voice a single character each. I have no idea why Bethesda bothered to hire Patrick Stewart etc because the publicity for the game barely mentions him, and I wasn't even aware he was in it until I was half-way through the game.

Salut and RIP. Any lesser-known roles worth searching out?

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/actor-terence-stamp-star-superman-films-dies-aged-87-2025-08-17/

POOR COW!

Billy Budd, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Hit. He has a hilarious bit in Bowfinger.

The absolute precision and economy with which Stamp plays General Zod in this scene, where he gets just over a minute to put across a complex character (after a 2 minute Brando monologue no less)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7vn5DyHzI

He did a grand job of predicting the Incels here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNfVyomYlC8

Don't know if it's lesser-known, but Fellini's 'Toby Dammit' (in the portmanteau Spirits of the Dead) is an extraordinary star vehicle for Stamp; Italian directors (see also Pasolini's Theorem, made the same year) somehow seemed to best intuit that combination of devilry and innocence, darkness and light, in that face, that voice. RIP.

As a kid watching Superman II (the superior Richard Lester version re-edited for ABC, of course) I wondered why Stamp and Sarah Douglas sounded strange. I realized after watching many other Stamp films that their voices had been electronically deepened.

RIP

The writer Peter Hogan on Facebook:

About 20 years ago, I was cutting through backstreets somewhere in sunny Soho. Rounded a corner and there was Terence Stamp, sitting at a table outside a cafe. I was wearing a Batman tee shirt that day, just the black bat logo on a grey background.
Stamp and I locked eyes - and his were incredible eyes, that regarded you like a slightly bored cat would, and there was no way I could break the moment. Instead I briefly stammered something to the effect that I'd always liked his work. He slightly inclined his head and said, 'Thank you, Batman' in his huskiest voice. A moment to treasure.

Fairwell dear Tel. You were a true inspiration, both in & out of heels. We’ll always have Kings Canyon, Kings road & F’ing ABBA. Wishing you well on your way ‘Ralph’! xxxx💕

— Guy Pearce (@TheGuyPearce) August 17, 2025

Always loved the double hula hoop thing they had Zod and crew locked inside, RIP Terrance, you're free now

^^^ nightmare fuel for me as a kid

https://i.imgur.com/9XNP7l2.gif

I love that Peter Hogan story

Hell of a post here:

https://www.facebook.com/chasbusch/posts/pfbid0rQR69YYrWAxAbTJgTireMuwM9BUR2kesh7z2ufEQHiP6yQFL7rkeYiocWZjP7Hhzl

The story in question:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1elIeNh6QK575ZMsK4bg-ljp2TsnPvxvxgaiS4xxfSIs/edit?tab=t.0

I love how that interview ended. He was obviously very comfortable in his own skin and a natural as an actor/entertainer.