MOSAIC MEDIA GROUP / MAD CHANCE / Collection ChristopheL via AFP
The actor Terence Stamp, here photographed for the needs of the film “Max La Menace” (2008) with Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway.
Cinema – Day of Mourning for British cinema. A marking and prolific actor for several decades, the English actor Terence Stamp died this Sunday, August 17, as his family said in a press release. The Sicilian, Walkyrie, Wall Street, Star Wars, Priscilla, Folle du DÉctment and especially the first saga Superman… He will have marked the history of the 7th art in more ways than one.
Died at the age of 87, ” He leaves behind an extraordinary work, both as an actor and as a writer, who will continue to touch people for years “Said the press release shared by his family to Reuters.
Before retiring from the middle, his last appearance on the screen dates back the year 2021, where he played a secondary role but noticed in Last Night in Soho from Edgar Wright. Long before that, the actor had started with the big door. Because after having been overseen by Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret, he won his first and the only Oscar appointment for his first big role in 1963. It was for the statuette of the best supporting role in Billy Budd From Peter Ustinov, where he embodied a young naive sailor in the 18th century. To console himself, he will still get the most promising Golden Globe the same year.
After more than promising beginnings and a first nodal appointment, making him one of the icons of the Sixties Swinging, the actor will pass in front of Ken Loach’s camera in No tears for Joy and by Pier Paolo Pasolini in Theorem. But the real popular success of Terence Stamp will arrive a few years later with one of the first blockbusters in the history of cinema: Richard Donn’s Superman, released in 1978.
Warners Bros
Although Kitsch, the character of Zod (in the center of the image) embodied by Terence Stamp in the first Superman films will remain in history among the first serious adaptations of super-villains in the cinema.
If his role is very reduced in the first film, he will return from the second in the shoes of General Zod, a mythical antagonist of the comics of the steel man. Opposed to the Truleman more true than life of Christopher Reeve, this role will remain a significant moment in his acting career. Especially since his story with Superman will not end there, since he will also embody the biological father of Clark Kent, the Kryptonian Jor-El, in the series of the 2000s Smallville.
Prolific career alongside the greatest
Another great success of his career, this time in the 1990s: Priscilla, Folle du DÉctment of Stephan Elliott. With Hugo Weany and Guy Pearce in the title roles, he embodied a member of a troop of drag-queens traveling Australia aboard a bus that has become famous and giving his name to the film.
Among these other striking roles, difficult to escape his brief but intense incarnation of Chancellor Valorum in Star Wars: the ghost threat, yes man With Jim Carrey or Walk With Tom Cruise. Without forgetting The Sicilian by Michael Cimino in 1987. A prolific year where he will also be playing Wall Street d’Oliver Stone.
During the last years of career, he will also collaborate with Tim Burton twice (Big Eyes et Miss Peregrine) and will also officiate in the successful series His Dark Materials In an episode of season 2.
