Terence Stamp (1938-2025)

[diamonds]

For what it's worth, here's what the man himself had to say in 2021:

TERRY GROSS: Terence Stamp in a scene from "The Limey." Terence Stamp, did you ever talk that way (laughter)?

STAMP: No, I didn't really. Well, I may have. But when I was working on it - that was really how my dad spoke and how my uncle spoke. And strangely enough, in England, I got a lot of stick for that. You know, people - critics said, oh, nobody talks like that. But the truth is that they haven't been to the local Turkish bath on Saturday morning, you know, where everybody talks like that.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Paul Andrew Williams wrote a lovely piece in the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/a ... w-williams

Edgar Wright wrote a nice tribute on Twitter too. Of course Stamp's last role was in Last Night in Soho. Diana Rigg's too.

[pistolwink]

At one point Wilson goes into a long and monotonous spiel trying to defend himself to a narcotics officer who's also shadowing Valentine. The cop listens to the end, then deadpans: "You're not from round here, are you?" But he doesn't sound like he's from round here either.

He misremembers the tag! The DEA agent (played by Bill Duke) pauses at length after Wilson's soliloquoy and says, absolutely deadpan: "There's just one thing I don't understand. The thing I don't understand is every motherfucking word you're saying."

It's a good joke (though it's actually not that hard to understand what he's saying, indeed what he's saying is a crucial bit of foreshadowing). I don't doubt that Stamp's Cockney is terrible but I like the performance just the same, and I think Soderbergh is firing on all cylinders with this one.

[colinr0380]

Here's the scene in question, which pairs well with Duke's cameo in the later Mandy! I think one of the aspects of the playing up of the cockney stuff is probably also to emphasise the way that Valentine is also running with Black and Latino characters (such as Luis Guzman's sidekick, where it is used as odd couple banter. Then when Lesley Ann Warrens' character enters the picture, she finds it more charming), and finding that his own patois isn't particularly in vogue any more.

It has been a while since I last listened to it, but isn't The Limey also the film that has the famously friendly-acerbic commentary between Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs, who I seem to remember keeps taking Soderbergh to task on what he has done to his screenplay by doing all of the stylistic editing tricks to it, and blaming the technique for forcing the dialogue into having to be too blunt and over-explanatory? I do not remember if that was relating to the cockney rhyming slang, mostly on the 'we're going to make damn sure he notices the missing picture in Peter Fonda's house!' moment! In some was I understand Dobbs getting annoyed, because Soderbergh is turning a relatively standard revenge tale into a cut-up film full of fantasies of action and memories of times past that exist beyond the scope of the film, and play on the personas of the actors, and the weight of baggage of their previous roles. Its kind of Roeg-ian in that way.

[ellipsis7]

Nice piece from The Guardian re. Stamp & his cameo in THE COMPANY OF WOLVES - ‘If the devil did exist, he’d be just such a gentleman’: Neil Jordan remembers Terence Stamp...

Michelangelo Antonioni had also first considered Terence Stamp & Jean Shrimpton for the lead roles in BLOW-UP before finally opting for David Hemmings & Vanessa Redgrave...

[MichaelB]

Walerian Borowczyk's unmade Ancestral Mansions was supposed to star Stamp and Kate Bush.

It was also supposed to be Borowczyk's return to serious arthouse fare, but although he raised half the budget from his old friend Anatole Dauman of Argos Films, the BFI Production Board baulked at backing "a foreign pornographer".

Sadly, Borowczyk's next film was Emmanuelle V, which rather proved their point!

[Orlac]

Sadly, Borowczyk's next film was Emmanuelle V, which rather proved their point!

What's the general consensus on that one, by the standards of the series if not its director!