Ray Davies, writer of The Kinks’ indestructible Waterloo Sunset, has, in recent decades, denied that a key line refers to Terence Stamp and Julie Christie. The myth, however, is so intoxicating that the world will continue to believe. “Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday night,” Davies sang in 1967. “As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset I am in paradise.”
This was the same year Stamp, who has died at the age of 87, appeared opposite Christie in John Schlesinger’s magnificent (and magnificently groovy) take on Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Filmed in gorgeous, misty colours by cinematographer Nic Roeg, Stamp, as Sergeant Frank Troy, did almost as much for vintage military chic as did the precisely contemporaneous Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He and Christie, romantically linked off camera, were the age’s signature couple: suave, casual, informal, staggeringly good-looking. Nobody better represented how, as the second World War receded into history, British youth shook off imperial chains and embraced colour and possibility.
Stamp, a working-class kid from London’s East End, was in all the right films for all the right directors. He won best actor at Cannes for William Wyler’s The Collector in 1965. He was in spy romp Modesty Blaise for Joseph Losey. He was in Poor Cow for Ken Loach. He was sinister in Teorema for Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The chiselled actor drifted away from the limelight in the early 1970s, but kept stubbornly returning for clever comebacks. Fascistic as General Zod in the Superman films. A charismatic gangster opposite John Hurt and Tim Roth in Stephen Frears’s The Hit from 1984. Camp as chicory coffee in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert from 1994. Last seen referencing his own 1960s shapes in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho from 2021, Stamp aged enviably into a foxy version of the man he had been when Waterloo Sunset was in the top five.
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Terence Henry Stamp was born in Stepney as the eldest of five children (his brother Chris famously managed The Who). Stamp’s dad, a tugboat stoker, had trouble getting his head around the lad’s career. “He genuinely believed that people like us didn’t do things like that,” Stamp told Sight and Sound in 2013. “He was a stoker, for Christ’s sake.”
When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: ‘They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp’
With dad away from home a great deal, Terence was largely raised by the women of the family – mum, gran, aunts. A smart kid, he first found himself in the other emblematic profession of the 1960s: working his way up the advertising business. He eventually won a scholarship to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in South Kensington and built on that training in repertory theatre. These early years sharing a flat with Michael Caine – and partying with Peter O’Toole – later took on the quality of legend.
“The young Michael Caine was a joy to be with,” Stamp said. “We had lots of wonderful times. I’m sure he wasn’t trying to educate me, but he did. I was very new to showbiz, and he was a whole era older than me and had been in the business a lot.”
Stamp landed spectacularly with a feature debut as the impossibly good looking title character in Peter Ustinov’s 1962 take on Herman Melville’s nautical drama Billy Budd. The Oscar nomination that came his way confirmed the arrival of a supernatural force. Stamp then cleverly positioned a toe in all streams of the Swinging Sixties. He did social realism in Poor Cow. He did camp glam in Modesty Blaise. He showed a taste for arthouse with his chilling performance as sinister visitor to a bourgeois Italian family in Teorem. But that turn in Far From The Madding Crowd is surely the standout. It matters not a whit – indeed it is part of the appeal – that Stamp and Christie, though playing characters from the mid-19th century, looked to have stepped straight from Carnaby Street of a century later.
“On the set, the fact that she had been my girlfriend just never came up,” Stamp said of Christie in 2015. “I saw her as Bathsheba, the character she was playing, who all the men in the film fell in love with. But it wasn’t hard, with somebody like Julie.”
In that same interview with the Guardian, he pondered how his fame withered round about the time the Beatles broke up. This didn’t happen to Michael Caine. It didn’t happen to Julie Christie.
“It’s a mystery to me. I was in my prime,” Stamp said. “When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: ‘They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp.’”
The older Terence Stamp (still in his early 30s) reacted by taking a massive worldwide trip that eventually brought him to India. The rumour goes that, when the offer came, in 1976, to play the villain in Superman, it was addressed to “Clarence Stamp”.
He never equalled the famously (often ill-advisedly) Stakhanovite work rate of Caine, but Stamp continued to secure decent roles at regular intervals. He finally married, at the age of 64, in 2002, but was divorced from Elizabeth O’Rourke, an Australian some decades his junior, just six years later.
Whatever Ray Davies might claim, Stamp (and Christie, still with us at 85) will always remain the immortal lovers in the magical normality of Waterloo Sunset.
“I’ve heard from some people that Ray Davies is now denying it,” Stamp said in 2013. “But my brother Chris told me that Ray told him that when he wrote those lines he was picturing Julie Christie and myself. In the headlines, we were like the young people of the day. So, I was very flattered by that.”
