In Memoriam: Terence Stamp

If you believe, as I do, that the movie screen is predominantly a canvas for the human face then few have ever belonged up there more than Terence Stamp. His cockney baritone was distinct, he often had a supercharged presence, but above all else, he had those blue eyes illuminating the celluloid in the dark. And it’s why it made no sense that when he arrived on the scene with guns figuratively blazing in the 60s, earning an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor for his very first role in “Billy Budd” (1962), he virtually disappeared for a time in the 70s. “I remember my agent telling me,” Stamp would explain to The Guardian in 2015, “‘They are looking for a young Terence Stamp.’” Hollywood might be obsessed with age, but age is just a number, and eyes don’t lie. Young, old, middle-age, whatever, Stamp’s star might have waxed and waned in accordance with the industry’s fickle demands, but his eyes never dimmed.

 
When Stamp’s death was announced on Sunday, August 17th, at the age of 87, the film author and journalist Mark Harris took exception with the late actor’s frequent categorization in obits as “Superman” costar. “He was sexier, weirder, darker, so much more interesting than that,” Harris wrote, noting that Stamp’s career contained “Many entry points.” And, well, yeah, sure. Many entry points! And for some of us Gen-Xers, “Superman” was the entry point or “Superman II,” to be more exact, which I would half-watch with a bath towel for a cape while pretending to be the Man of Steel fighting Terence Stamp as General Zod in my basement. Still, I understood what Harris meant. Because even if Stamp’s 1999 revenge fantasy “The Limey” worked whether you knew Stamp’s back catalogue beyond “Superman” or not, it worked so much better when you had a fuller sense of the actor’s history. Because Soderbergh infused the movie with that history (underlined in how it used footage of the younger Stamp in 1967’s Ken Loach film “Poor Cow”), as much about the passage of time and Hollywood itself as revenge, a transcendent thriller as the actor’s culmination, not to mention a close-up laden celebration of his face. 

The real Stamp revelation for me, though, was in 2021, when I finally saw Stephen Frears’s “The Hit” (1984), an existential art film disguised as a thriller, which is pretty much my genre sweet spot. Stamp was Willie Parker, a one-time London gangster who testifies against his old criminal cohorts in court, transforming himself into a marked man. Indeed, a decade later a couple hitmen come for him in the Spanish villa where he’s hiding out to transport him to Paris and bring him face to face with the kingpin he put away for his score-settling execution. Stamp, though, plays with an air of stoic resignation, a man who has spent the last 10 years philosophically preparing for this very moment. When his captors briefly lose track of him, he is found not trying to get away but gazing at a waterfall, hardly bothered by the gun that gets pointed at him as if he exists on some metaphysical plain a bunch of puny bullets could never penetrate. 

Yet, when one hitman eschews waiting to off Willie in Paris and just decides to shoot him on the side of the road, all that reasoned forbearance falls away. “You can’t,” he says, as Stamp’s register switches to a pleading whine, and his heretofore impassive expression to a pitiable wince. “Not now.” Essentially, Stamp pulls the rug out from under his own performance. In the end, everyone is afraid of death. Willie turns and runs, making it just a few steps before getting shot in the back, falling to the ground, dead, of course, and the movie just moves on from him, as the world might.