Terence Stamp in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” (Photo via The Washington Blade)
Like so many others of my generation, I first became aware of Terence Stamp when he appeared as General Zod in 1978’s “Superman,” and I was struck by the fact that, despite his relatively short screen time and the fact that I had never heard of him, he was featured in the movie’s advertising as if he were a major player.
As a budding young cinema nerd, that, coupled with the cool charisma he projected through his villainous turn as an interplanetary supercriminal, piqued my attention. It wasn’t long thereafter when a late-night broadcast of “Billy Budd” – the 1962 film version of Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella in which the then-young Stamp was first thrust into stardom – introduced me to him as he had been introduced to the world that came before me. And it was electrifying.
Here was a young actor whose breathtaking beauty was rendered even more irresistible by his palpable intelligence and his carefree disregard of contemporary standards of masculinity. I was captured by the ease with which he embodied his role as young 19th-century sailor, conscripted into service on a British warship and turned into an outcast for his gentle nature and optimistic spirit; pitted against an aggressively masculine superior whose obsessive dislike of him snowballs into tragedy, he embodied a quality that resonated deeply with parts of myself I was still not fully prepared to explore. Though I may have been too young to catch all the obvious queer subtext that was built into the story by Melville himself (Google it if you’re skeptical), I knew that there was something about this movie that had been ignored or missed outright when it was released. The film was largely dismissed as a weak and pointless effort, almost certainly because of a refusal to acknowledge its homoerotic subtext – but that I somehow understood and into which I felt immediately entwined, all because I recognized something of myself in Stamp’s near-angelic personification of the role.
I was not the only one, nor was I the first. Coming into the public spotlight in a time when post-war British austerity was yielding to new and more socially aware attitudes toward masculinity and sexual expression, Stamp – who received his first and only Oscar nomination for “Billy Budd,” despite its lukewarm reception – soon became a fixture of “mod” popular culture, parlaying his confidently androgynous appeal into international stardom. He was a film star who worked with revered artists like Fellini and upstart auteurs like Pasolini, half of the era’s “it” couple with model Jean Shrimpton, and a jet-setting fashion plate as famous for his sense of style as for his skills in front of the camera.
Indeed, while he was the embodiment of his era’s particular flavor of fame and glamour, the kind of stardom afforded to more conventionally masculine UK-born contemporaries – like Sean Connery, Michael Caine, or Peter O’Toole – eluded him. Adored by the glitterati, he was ignored by the mainstream, who found his work in films like “The Collector” (as a deeply repressed sexual predator who kidnaps a young woman) or “Far From the Madding Crowd” (opposite fellow “mod” icon Julie Christie) too challenging, too ambiguous and vaguely transgressive to fully embrace, no matter the considerable appeal of his physical beauty. In hindsight, it’s easy to recognize the brilliance of his boundary-pushing work during these early “salad days,” but to the masses of the time, there was perhaps something too uncomfortable about the feelings he evoked onscreen.
And then, there was Pasolini’s “Teorema,” in which he played an angelic, otherworldly figure who seduces an entire Italian bourgeois family – mother, father, son, daughter, and maid – without regard for conventional notions of sexuality or socially condoned boundaries. More than any other film, perhaps, it was the lightning rod through which his entire film career would eventually be illuminated. Confidently embodying a radical vision of sexual fluidity before the language for such things was even available in common public discourse, he became a symbol of gender ambiguity decades before appearing in the film that would eventually cement his legacy as a queer cinema icon: 1994’s “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” in which his stately portrayal of a transgender drag performer mentoring a pair of younger queerlings earned him a well-deserved and long-overdue “comeback.”
In the intervening years, of course, there was “Superman” and its 1980 sequel, in which he turned a one-dimensional villain into a fan-favorite symbol of elegantly campy outsider-ism. Before that, there was a retreat from the spotlight, during which he explored his spiritual side in India; after, he embarked on a whole new career of boundary-pushing projects (like Stephen Frear’s 1984 gangster-centered character study “The Hit”) and mainstream cameos (as in 1987’s “Wall Street” and 1988’s “Young Guns”). But it was “Priscilla” – despite a later appearance in the “Star Wars” franchise (in 1999’s “The Phantom Manace”) – that permanently cemented him in the cinematic firmament, embodying a dignified, confident, and utterly aspirational portrait of queer identity that continues to inspire today.
After my discovery of “Billy Budd,” all of Stamp’s work was on my radar; but alas, in an industry that values easy conformity over open-minded exploration, so much of his career remained obscured in the public eye by indifference; I went on the journey undertaken by countless fans before me, disturbed by “The Collector,” titillated by “Madding Crowd,” and thrillingly corrupted by the radical transgressiveness of “Teorema.” I was further drawn to his performances in “The Hit” and “The Limey,” and forever empowered by his unflagging commitment to challenging his audiences in a way I had to assume he wanted to challenge himself. In the end, there was far too little of Terence Stamp in the public imagination than he deserved – and that, perhaps more than anything else, made me enthralled by his unique place in pop culture history.
And while it may have been “Priscilla” that introduced him to a new audience of queer fans, just as “Superman” had brought him back into a spotlight he had long since abandoned, it was ultimately his fearless dedication to stretching cultural boundaries around sex, gender, masculinity, and identity itself that made him the unsung giant we are left to mourn in the wake of his passing last week, at age 87 – a personal hero for myself and the countless other queer people who saw what he was doing and found themselves magnified, validated, and truly seen because of it. Never content to be defined as a sex symbol, a leading man, or any other easily-categorized “type” (though he openly discussed his non-conforming sexual leanings, he always declined to identify as “bisexual” or “queer” or any of the other labels we all feel so compelled to embrace in our militant modern age), he instead embodied a spirit of open-minded exploration and individually-defined humanity, in which cultural boundaries and expectations are not only unnecessary, but counter to our national inclinations to live an authentic life.
If I had been a movie star, I would have wanted to be the kind of movie star that Terence Stamp was – and that is saying a lot.
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