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Seductive dark prince Mesmerising and unknowable - but a febrile kind of talent
The Guardian
|August 18, 2025
A stranger arrives, makes love to everyone and then leaves," said Pier Paolo Pasolini to Terence Stamp, outlining the plot of his 1968 classic Theorem. "That's your part." Stamp exclaimed. "I can play that." It was the role that the man was born to play and would play, with subtle variations, throughout his career.
From his first appearance as the eerily beautiful sailor in 1962's Billy Budd through to his last manifestation as "The Silver-Haired Gentleman" in Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho, Stamp remained a brilliantly, mesmerisingly unknowable presence. He was the seductive dark prince of British cinema; an actor who carried an air of elegant mystery. "As a boy I always believed I could make myself invisible," he once said. He showed up and made magic but he never stuck around for as long as we wanted.
This story is from the August 18, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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