The first time I saw Terence I was fucking terrified. It was the Stamp stillness, in the 1965 film The Collector, and I remember being so chilled by it. Years later, when I met him in London, I had to get past the eyes. He can suck the oxygen out of a room but as he began to trust me, he slowly opened the tap and let me breathe a bit more.
Even 30 years later, he could still do it to me. He would get very quiet and look at me and I’d think: “Oh god, I’m getting the stare.” As soon as those eyes locked in you were frightened; or if you were a girl, your legs would turn to jelly. Once we were having lunch in the Ivy, and a very famous actress came in. He said “Watch this” and did nothing except look at her. Within 20 minutes she’d dropped a plate and knocked a glass over.
Before playing Bernadette Bassenger in the film I directed, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Stamp had never really done comedy. At the time he had that terrible thing a lot of English actors fall into at the end of their career of playing villains. According to somebody who knew his agent, he simply said: “If I’m just going to sit in the room and moustache twirl, I’m out.” She said: “Funny, a script hit the desk today. You want to try something different? Read this.” He was horrified but he was looking for something; it was the perfect moment.
Stamp really struggled for the first couple of weeks, but the beauty is that struggle made it into the character. At the beginning he was trying out different versions of being a lady and none of them worked. He spent two weeks with Robyn Lee, a very famous Australian drag queen. She taught him how to walk, how to hold a glass, how to very gently sweep his hair; we just left them alone for hours. There was a singular moment quite early in the shoot where we had to do this Shake Your Groove Thing number in a bar in Broken Hill [in Australia’s outback] filled with miners. He was an absolute wreck, going out there to a group of pretty tough people in a tough town dressed as a pom-pom girl. But something clicked in him on stage. He came off and said: “I’m over the hurdle now. I can do this.”
The first time he saw the film was at the Palais at the Cannes film festival and it was at capacity. There were one or two moments where I felt his hand sneak onto my leg, and he’d dig his hand in, thinking, bastard. And then the place went berserk. There was a standing ovation. We didn’t know then but it was being timed and the papers would print how long it went on for. Terence just said, “Guv’na, let’s quit while we’re ahead,” and walked out. That’s Terence. He was his own man; an enigma.
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Our relationship started 35 years ago but I always kept in contact. What’s really dawned on me since his passing is that, in a weird way, he kind of became the father figure I never had. Whenever I got to London, or wherever he was, we’d just go hang out and talk filth and have cups of tea. I really lost a friend.
Terence was not keen to do a sequel to Priscilla. He said, “Leave it alone, there’s no topping it”, and I agreed. Then one day, the plot found me. When I pitched it to Terence four years ago, he looked at me and said: “Well, I didn’t see that one coming.” So me, Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence had been working towards it and I think we’ve got something massive to say. Terence knew his time was limited, and he said, “Well, why don’t we just pre-shoot me? Just in case.” On the last day I said: “That’s a wrap on Terence Stamp.” The cameras were rolling and he was beaming like the Cheshire Cat, but my god, those words will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Photograph by Terence Donovan/Camera Press