![]() Has Stamp himself ever wanted to be a father? ‘He was really handsome and I don’t think any of us boys were as good looking.’ ‘My dad never earned more than 12 quid a week actually he wasn’t cut out to be married with kids. Tom was a stoker, then tugboat captain on the Thames, while Ethel raised their six children. Stamp’s parents Tom and Ethel were working class East Enders. And when I thought of my own mum and dad and their real love relationship and how neither of them were ever unfaithful I identified with it more.’ ![]() ‘He told me that I shouldn’t be because he’d written it about his own grandfather “and he was as good looking as you”. ‘I wasn’t as enthusiastic as he was hoping for and he said to me, apropos of nothing, “You’re worried about your looks, aren’t you?” And I thought that was so insightful of him. We did the singing live and I did it in one take.’īut when Stamp first met the director there was tension. And he adds: ‘I only had two lessons for Song For Marion. Stamp says: ‘It was because of him that I began to study the voice. I know you’ve left drama school, but remember as your looks go your voice will become empowered.’ He mimics Olivier in a high-pitched tone telling him: ‘You’ve got a terrible voice. In his first film, Term of Trial (1962), Laurence Olivier criticised his voice. He’s always been drawn to the exciting and the exuberant, the over-the-top and the dark. ‘I originally turned down The Collector - because I didn’t want to be a spotty invisible bank clerk with a snotty nose.’īut he would go on to make his name in Modesty Blaise and as bad boy Sergeant Troy in Far From The Madding Crowd with Julie Christie.Īfter a fallow Eighties his career revived when he played a drag queen in The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert (1994) and the dangerously vengeful father in Stephen Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999). Perhaps that’s because he has a deep seated fear that he is ordinary. ‘But the other reservation I had with Song For Marion was that I felt I don’t play ordinary very well. I thought the universe had given me a second chance to conquer my fear of singing. ‘By the time I’d heard they’d cast Vanessa to play my wife I knew I wanted to do this film. When the movie came out and I saw Richard Harris do it I thought, “Well, I could have sung it as well as that”. ‘It is one of the few things in my career that I really regret. ‘In the Sixties the director Josh Logan begged me to play King Arthur in the musical of Camelot. ‘I realised it was a wonderful script but immediately had fears about the singing,’ he says. After her death his brittle heart is broken, and he eventually sings in her place. Marion, played by Redgrave, has cancer and finds joy in the local choral group. The film traces the end of the lives of an elderly couple living on a council estate. His latest role in Song For Marion required two terrifying things for him. He’s never talked about the marriage or break-up before. I ask if he is still friends with her? ‘Not really,’ he says. Seriously though, I’d never been married and I thought I would try it, but I couldn’t make a go of it.’ I always said I’ll try anything once other than incest or Morris dancing. Was he incredibly upset about the break-up? ‘Yeah, I was, absolutely. There’s a lot that can happen with the passing of time.’ ![]() She went back to Australia and that’s why I don’t see her, but if I do go there, I’m sure I will. ‘One of the things I’ve learned in life is that it’s very easy to make a lover from a friend but it’s very hard to make a friend from a lover.’ He laughs again, but this time it carries a little pain with it. But they divorced in 2008 on the grounds of his unreasonable behaviour. They married in a low-key ceremony in 2003, and they remained very private. He was working in Sydney and walked in to the pharmacy where she was training as a pharmacist in 1998. His wife, Elizabeth O’Rourke, was 35 years younger than him. To everyone’s surprise that didn’t stop him marrying at the age of 64. Model girlfriend: Terence Stamp pictured with his then girlfriend Jean Shrimptonin 1965
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