Terence Stamp, the villain from 'Superman', dies

The family of British actor Terence Stamp announced his death on Sunday. The actor, who rose to fame for his role as the Superman villain, was 87. "He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work as an actor and writer that will continue to inspire people," the statement said, without specifying the cause of his death.

Born in London's East End in 1938, he experienced the city's bombings as a child during World War II. He studied acting on a scholarship at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and was roommates with another great British actor, Michael Caine, and Julie Christie's partner. He was part of Swinging London in the 1960s.

In 1962, she made her film debut as the lead in the adaptation of Herman Melville's novel Billy Budd , directed by Peter Ustinov , a role that earned her an Oscar nomination. Her next appearance on the screen was that same year, opposite Laurence Olivier in the film A Scandal in the Schoolroom , directed by Peter Glenville. But her breakthrough role of that decade was as the lead in William Wyler's The Collector , a film that triumphed at Cannes in 1965. In 1967, she participated in John Schesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd. alongside Julie Christie, and in Ken Loach's first film, Poor Cow .

He was going to be James Bond after Sean Connery, but that plan didn't quite work out, and he moved to Italy. There, he worked with Fellini on Toby Dammit and Extraordinary Stories , a film adaptation of three Edgar Allan Poe stories by three directors (Roger Vadim and Louis Malle completed the trio). Stamp recalled in the documentary Fellini: I'm a Big Liar (2002) how his shoots with the director marked a turning point in his acting career. During that decade, he also filmed Teorema under the direction of the great Pier Paolo Pasolini.

But despite the prestige and accolades that launched his film career, it wasn't until his role in Superman in 1978 that he achieved star status. Stamp played the supervillain General Zod in the first two films of the saga alongside Christopher Reeve. He later recounted that at the time he received the offer, he was in an ashram in India, considering dedicating himself to tantric yoga. That telegram from his agent pulled him out of that adventure and transformed him into the unforgettable and evil Zod.

In the 1980s, she appeared in Stephen Frears' Revenge , Oliver Stone's hit films Wall Street , and Robert Redford and Deborah Wringer in Dangerously Together . In the 1990s, she starred in Beltenebros with Spanish director Pilar Miró and also starred in the hit Priscilla, Queen of the Desert . In the last decade, she appeared in Tim Burton's Big Eyes (2014) and Last Night in Soho in 2021, among other films.

In addition to his acting career, Stamp has written several memoirs. He married for the first time in 2002, to Elizabeth Rourke, a pharmacist 35 years his junior, whom he divorced six years later. Stamp always stated that his great love was the model Jean Shrimpton, with whom he formed an attractive couple in the 1960s.