I’VE NOT LET ON WHO I AM FOR 55 YEARS... UNTIL NOW
In an uproarious and unflinchingly honest interview, screen icon Terence Stamp reveals how he seduced Bardot, was dumped by Shrimpton, got close to Diana – and why, at 79, he’d rather practise yoga than have sex
No wonder women fall for Terence Stamp. He’s a handsome devil with impeccable manners and a gleam in his cornflowerblue eyes, even at the age of 79. But the legendary actor, who romanced Brigitte Bardot, Julie Christie and the supermodel Jean Shrimpton (and recently had a wife less than half his age) has to admit he is slowing down as a lover.
‘The fact is I am past my best. I’ve still got wonderful relationships with women but I’m not looking to get s***ged four times a week,’ says Stamp with that gruff, East Endturned-posh drawl of his.
How about once a month? The laugh in response is long and hearty. I’ll take that as a no. ‘My feeling about sex is that I’ve finally been tossed from the saddle of a horse that I’ve been clinging on to for the past 60 years. So it’s a kind of relief really.’
Slim and graceful, with a laurel wreath of white hair, Stamp is wearing a bottle-green linen suit made for him in Rome in 1968, at the height of his fame. He was nominated for an Oscar for his first film, Billy Budd, and starred in classics including Poor Cow and Far From The Madding Crowd.
That was when he had dark hair and brooding eyes and Oscar judges, film directors and beautiful women were falling at his feet – and before Jean Shrimpton broke his heart by leaving him.
Stamp dropped out of fame for a while after that, fleeing to the ashrams of India at the end of the Sixties for a spiritual awakening, as described in his fascinating new book, The Ocean Fell Into The Drop.
The title comes from a quote by his Indian guru. ‘I wrote it after being challenged by my publisher, who said: “Do you still feel the need to be an enigma?”
That took my breath away because, in truth, that’s the way I’ve stayed afloat for 55 years. I’ve never really let on exactly where I’m at until now.’
And he’s not going to hold back today, even revealing what really happened between him and Princess Diana. Her biographer Andrew Morton claimed they were lovers, but Stamp has never discussed this publicly before.
‘I met her at some function,’ he says dismissively, but actually it was the 1987 premiere of Wall Street, in which he plays the British tycoon Sir Larry Wildman – a character he based on the real-life millionaire Sir James Goldsmith, who at one time was rumoured to be Diana’s true father. ‘The relationship came about because my friend Oliver Hoare, the art dealer, knew her. I said: “I’d love to have a proper chat with her, why don’t you ask her if she’s up for it?” He asked and she said yes. We got on amazingly well. And because I wasn’t trying to s**g her we just kind of opened up to each other.
‘I saw the sadness in her because she’d gone into her marriage believing – she was a believer in the marriage and all that. And it didn’t turn out the way she expected it to.’ By this time Diana’s relationship with Charles had broken down. Stamp was single and enjoying a glorious second half to his career, after coming back from obscurity to appear in the first two Superman films. His grace and inner stillness worked well for evil General Zod. Stamp was renting an apartment in The Albany in Piccadilly, one of the most prestigious addresses in London. Diana was considered one of the most desirable women in the world, so to be bold – since he put it this way himself – why didn’t he want to ‘s**g’ her? ‘It wasn’t like that. I thought that was the last thing she needed, really. She just wanted somebody to talk to that was a guy, who would give her objective opinions. It happens with age. Because of your own values, you understand what young women are. You let go of things.’ Stamp was in his 50s at the time, while Diana was still in her 20s. And it wasn’t just dinner, he reveals. They met often. ‘It was over a period of time. But it wasn’t a formal thing, we’d just meet up for a cup of tea, or sometimes we’d have a long chat for an hour, sometimes it would be very quick.’ He is unusually willing to discuss their friendship today, perhaps because it’s around the anniversary of her death, but when I ask if he has any thoughts on
‘A lot of actors get addicted to the sherbet and to food. I’ve always thought of my body as an Aston Martin’
the tragic events of August 1997, Stamp closes down. ‘I don’t have any thoughts on that,’ he says with a tight jaw, looking away to the middle distance. Maybe not, but the feelings are obviously still strong.
Most of the time Stamp is honest and direct. Eye-wateringly so when I ask if he is still in the dating game, having been married just once. He married Elizabeth O’Rourke in 2002 after meeting her in a pharmacy in Australia. She was only 29, he was 64. They divorced after six years. So is he looking for love again?
‘Not really. I was conned into going to a function and a reporter came up to me and said: “We can’t print anything you say here, it’s one of the reasons we’re allowed to come, so I just want to ask you, person to person, are you still interested in women? There’s a couple of my friends and they’d like to know.”
‘I heard myself saying: “Look, I still have orgasms, but I’m not toujours pret – always ready – the way I used to be.” I said it in French, I thought it sounded better. And their jaws dropped. They couldn’t believe I said it. The shock was wonderful. They couldn’t write about it, those were the rules. But yeah. That’s the fact.’
Ican’t quite believe he has just said it on the record but there’s a serenity about Stamp that partly comes from half a century of meditation. It’s also partly from having survived a near-death experience in 2015 while filming Bitter Harvest in Ukraine. The stallion he was riding on the last day of filming reared up and threw him off. No harm done... then half a ton of white stallion crashed onto me.’
The impact was taken by his chest and pelvis, which fractured in six places. Two ribs were torn, so was his bladder and his rotator cuff. ‘I’ve always thought my last thoughts would be profound, but when I looked up and saw that the horse had lost his balance, my thought was: “When the tabloids hear about this the headline will be Middle-Aged Actor Killed By Horse’s A***.” His sister-in-law was not fooled by his joking. ‘She said: “You didn’t see angels, you didn’t hear voices, but you did have a near-death experience.” So that has changed me a lot.’
How so? ‘It’s not that I’ve fallen out of love with acting, but I do view it differently. I think that is underpinned by the knowledge that death happens to everybody and it’s going to happen to me, and it could happen any time. Krishnamurti [his Indian guru] said something wonderful. He said: “Beauty is love and death, and neither can be known.”’
Is he afraid of death? ‘Fear is only thought. The acknowledging of it is the ending of it.’
OK, is he ready then? ‘Well it’s going to happen. I’m just hoping that when death is near it will be in one of those times when I am totally present in the moment. The trick is in the presence.’
Stamp doesn’t drink and follows a strict vegetarian diet as well as practising yoga every day. ‘I am in good health. My body knows how long it’s been here, though. It doesn’t matter how much yoga I do, the body has been here for a long time, it’s nearer 80 years than 70.’ He looks in terrific shape, so what’s the secret? ‘It’s pride and vanity that enables me to stay with a body not dictating to the mind. I know a lot of actors just can’t. They get addicted to the sherbet [an old East End word for booze] and to the food in the same way. And I feel those things, but I’ve always regarded my body as an Aston Martin.
His new book is an attempt to provide something of a legacy, which makes me wonder, does he regret not having children? There’s a very long pause. ‘I don’t really. But what I’ve noticed in the past ten years or so is that I’m really enjoying the kids of my nieces in a way that a grandfather would.
‘It is a great joy to me. Since my brother Chris [a successful rock music manager who helped break The Who] preceded me in changing his cosmic address I have the feeling that his grandchildren look at me like they were looking at him. So no, I actually don’t have regrets.’
The phrase ‘changed his cosmic address’ suggests he believes in life after death. ‘Yeah. I think we persist. When breath leaves the body, the body returns to clay. So I think there’s just a kind of vibrational change in us.’
Terence was the eldest of five children born in Bow East London to Tom and Ethel Stamp, a taciturn tugboat master and a mother who loved music and the performing arts. They were poor but he inherited his parents’ knack for dressing in style anyway. Stamp became famous at a moment in the Sixties when working-class actors like himself and flatmate Michael Caine were all the rage.
‘Although it was a big shock at the time, once Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole and others had broken through, that was what people wanted. They didn’t mind if you had a real working-class accent or attitude, because those two did it on their own terms... Whereas nowadays the fashion has changed again. It’s changed radically.’
Is that because only the rich can afford to train and work for nothing as an actor? ‘Yeah, sure,’ says Stamp, who won a scholarship to drama school, the likes of which are rare now.
His career went off like a rocket at the start of the Sixties when he earned an Oscar nomination for his very first movie, as the doomed young sailor Billy Budd.
The film was pivotal in other ways, too. Shooting the scene in which young Billy is hanged, Stamp had a transcendental experience – his mind emptied and he felt a new sense of oneness with the universe. ‘That would change his life. But in the meantime Stamp was sinister and sexy as the blade-whirling swordsman Sergeant Troy in Far From The Madding Crowd, with Julie Christie as Bathsheba.
They became lovers, so famously at the time that many assumed Ray Davies of The Kinks had immortalised them in Waterloo Sunset as Terry and Julie, meeting down by the river every Friday night. Davies preferred to leave it a mystery, but the association stuck in people’s minds.
Stamp had many other lovers in the Sixties, some described in his new book. His encounter with Brigitte Bardot was awkward at first because neither spoke the other’s language very well. The actor was wearing a pair of period-style trousers he had stolen from the set of Far From The Madding Crowd, which had curious flaps on the front, as he describes in his book. ‘“What is zith?” she enquired, pointing to the flap of my drop-fall strides. Galvanised, I grasped her outstretched fingers. I drew them theatrically towards the flap. “I have a little mouse in here.”’
But the woman who captured his heart was Jean Shrimpton, the original supermodel, who left the photographer David Bailey for him. She was the love of Stamp’s life but he blew it, as he once admitted.
‘She left me because she saw I was a lunatic. I wasn’t ready for a twin-soul relationship.’
Stamp dropped out of acting and headed for India with a broken heart, looking for a way to understand that transcendental moment on the set of Billy Budd. That was the home of the guru who would have the most influence on him. ‘I was just winging it until I met Krishnamurti.’ Stamp had always felt like a chancer, but now he began to discover an inner confidence and calm. ‘The balance of my life changed.’
Just as well, because for nine years he was more or less out of work. Then came a telegram summoning him to LA to play General Zod in Superman. Stamp soon found himself in demand again, culminating in a startling turn as a drag queen in 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.
It was a very risky part for a macho actor to take and Stamp admits to a ‘kaleidoscope of fears about looking silly’.
I thought: ‘What are you doing here? You’re a middle-aged man. You were the benchmark Iago at [his stage school] Webber Douglas. The best-dressed man in England. You’re a closet philosopher. You’ve sat with wise men...’
Then somebody calls out: ‘Camera. Playback. Action!’ And, Stamp writes, ‘My mind stops. I sense my lips moving, syncing the words, my body gyrating...’
He is fabulous in Priscilla, which is loved by many. More recently he was part of the flurry of films about older characters in the deeply touching Song For Marion.
These days Stamp is relaxed and chilled, wandering about town in the sandals he prefers to wear because the yoga has made his feet spread.
Not everybody appreciates them. ‘I was asked to leave The Ritz last week because I had Birkenstocks on. They wouldn’t let me in.’ He has been a terrific customer for the Ritz hotel, going back to the Sixties. ‘My brother Chris made a lot of money and at the height of his fortune he lived there for about six months. I used to go there and see him. So I thought: “How ironic that I’ve been asked to leave because I’m improperly dressed.”’
What else was he wearing? ‘Not much really. The truth is I’ve got the most wonderful whistles [suits] and all kinds of shirts and everything but when I came back to England about ten years ago, I just suddenly realised it no longer meant a great deal to me to be beautifully dressed all the time.’ Didn’t he ask if they knew who he was?
‘No, course not. As I was leaving, the guy said: “Oh Mr Stamp, how are you sir?” And I thought: “I won’t be coming back here too often in the future.” But plenty of other people know who he is. ‘I’m very famous now, in a way that has only been true over the past ten years, in the sense that I get recognised a lot on the street.’ Why does he think that is?
‘The nice reason is that the British appreciate longevity. And the ordinary reason is a lot of my movies are on the box now. Well it’s all kind of wonderful in a way, don’t you think?’
‘[Princess] Diana just wanted someone to talk to ... the time I spent with her was a good time’ ‘I was asked to leave The Ritz last week because I had Birkenstocks on’