Liking – or not liking – his directors is one of Stamp’s big themes: joining Schlesinger on the naughty step are Ken Loach (“too political”), Joseph Losey (“no sense of humour”) and Pasolini (“didn’t talk to me”). But I didn’t have a lot of time for him.” “I’ll say this for Schlesinger, when he got in the cutting room and realised he had all this extra footage, he used it. That’s where the celebrated sword-demonstration scene came from, in which Stamp waggles his not entirely unsymbolic weapon to Christie’s squealing delight. I was working on my own, really.” Fortunately, says Stamp, he bonded with the director of photography, Nicolas Roeg (who would, of course, have a spectacular directorial career himself), and the two would go off after shooting had officially ended for the day to work on sequences of their own. He wasn’t exactly hostile, but he really didn’t help me.
#TERENCE STAMP PLUS#
Plus I wasn’t his first choice: he really wanted Jon Voight. “He didn’t strike me as a guy who was particularly interested in film. Stamp goes on to explain – with what I come to realise is a habitual forthright honesty – that the experience was somewhat ruined by the fact he didn’t respect, or like, Schlesinger. “It was the first really commercial project I got involved with, and I was rather shocked by the reaction. These days, Stamp is sanguine about the film, which has regained some cultural currency with the impending release of another adaptation, featuring Carey Mulligan in the Julie Christie role and Tom Sturridge in Stamp’s. At the time, however, it was considered a disaster: poor reviews, especially in the US, and a general inability to see past the with-it celebrity personas of Stamp and Christie, translated into underwhelming box-office and a severe career misstep for its director, John Schlesinger. Almost three hours long, smeared with mud and sheep dung in its grimly realistic recreation of early 19th-century Dorset, and benefiting from performances from actors at the top of their games, it glows on the screen exactly the way it must have when first released in 1967. Spruced-up and spring-cleaned, and just less than half a century old, Far From the Madding Crowd is something else: they really don’t make them like this any more. Why Far From the Madding Crowd is the one film you should watch this week Guardianīut cinema has a habit of folding back on itself this week sees the reissue of one of those imperishable 1960s films, Far From the Madding Crowd, an adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel, in which Stamp plays the coldly raffish Sergeant Troy opposite Julie Christie’s Bathsheba. Retro fetishism started in 1999 with the Steven Soderbergh-directed The Limey, in which Stamp played a Get Carter-ish avenging gangster, and has continued to the present day, with Stamp currently lionised by another 60s-fetishising film-maker, Tim Burton, with roles in Big Eyes (as a snooty art critic) and the yet-to-be-completed Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. A peripatetic revival followed, with occasional juicy roles (The Hit, Wall Street, The Adventures of Priscilla, Song for Marion) alternating with pay-the-bills Hollywood (Young Guns, Elektra, Wanted).
His career fell off a cliff at the start of the 1970s, the drought ending with an improbable offer to play General Zod in the first two Superman movies. Now 76, Stamp had a fantastic 1960s, during which he starred in a handful of imperishable classics ( Billy Budd, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, Pasolini’s Theorem) and consorted with some of the era’s most beautiful women (Julie Christie, Jean Shrimpton, Brigitte Bardot). Where’s the gents?” Having been pointed in the right direction, Stamp returns, visibly relieved. How will this legend of British acting introduce himself? What pearl of wisdom will he divulge? Stamp, self-confessed “decadent” and former holder of the title of world’s best-looking man (1963-1969) speaks: “Gotta take a slash, man. T erence Stamp sticks his head round the door and opens his mouth.
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