Terence Stamp, the fascinating British actor, passed away.
I remember meeting him at a dinner in Rome in 1970, when we were both quite young.
He obviously had movie friends in Italy, where he had filmed Teorema by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Toby Dammit directed by Federico Fellini in Spirits of the Dead.
As a journalist in the Hollywood Foreign Press, I interviewed him in 1994 about The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in 1999 about The Limey by Steven Soderbergh, in 2013 about Song for Marion (Unfinished Song).
I asked the prolific author about a memoir he had written in 2012: Rare Stamps: Reflections On Living, Breathing, and Acting.
Terence Stamp © HFPA 1994
“I’m nearer the end than the beginning, so I thought of what kind of advice could I give to young artists. It wasn’t like an autobiography. It was talking about the great men and great women I’ve met, the things I have learned from them that have changed the course of my life as a performing artist. I wrote about the wisdom that had been given to me by Peter Ustinov, by Orson Welles, by Laurence Olivier, by Michael Caine, and by the great sages that I’ve met in my travels.”
Elisa Leonelli, Terence Stamp (c) HFPA 1999
Terence Stamp also starred in Billy Bud (1962) directed by Peter Ustinov, receiving the Most Outstanding Future Stars award at the 1963 Golden Globes, and in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) directed by John Schlesinger from the novel by Thomas Hardy.