21 Stardust

By middle-age Terence Stamp had got into the habit of rejecting offers and, by his own admission, ended up not working much at all. He was adrift in this transitional state when he worked with me

Anthony Calf, Caroline Bliss
in Deadly Recruits

on Deadly Recruits. It was apparently Caroline Bliss, one of his co-stars on that film who, later, inveigled him into accepting the role of an ageing drag queen in the Australian feature, Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

In view of his past, as a young buck whose lovers had included Julie Christie and supermodel, Jean Shrimpton, his transgender appearance in this movie seemed a total contradiction of his perceived image; but for that very reason it rang bells. It allowed Stamp from the vantage point of maturity to take an ironic stance towards his past. Through the guise of a preening, once famous, drag queen, he could revisit his past as one who had done it all, seen it all, and was now facing a lonely old age, from the safe distance of self-irony. Primarily through this casting the film gained a great deal of attention, and illuminated Terence Stamp, the sixties icon, in a sharp contemporary light.

It was however a film that came shortly afterwards that allowed him to cross the bridge into later years with his brilliant charisma still alight. That film was The Limey. Director, Steven Sonderberg, and writer, Lem Dobbs, had the inspiration, not just to cast Stamp in the lead role of a London gangster having just served a prison term, but to use extracts from his early film, Poor Cow, as

Terence Stamp in Poor Cow,
used as flashback in The Limey

flashbacks. (Had this ever been done before?) They were mindful that not all aging actors would want to appear on screen alongside their twenty-something self, but, when the proposition was put to him, Stamp had the good sense to go along with the idea. It enabled him to consolidate his acting career and burnish his star image. 

Critic Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, wrote of the film:

"Glimpses of young, dreamily beautiful Stamp and his no less imposing latter-day presence are used by Soderbergh with touching efficacy."

Terence Stamp in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey

Stamp’s whole trajectory had been away from his working class roots towards refinement, both in social manners and in spirituality. Now he turned round and embraced all that he had been from a point of maturity. Stamp had crossed the bridge from his twenties to his sixties, his charisma intact.