Semi-regular viewers of this column are aware that I occasionally champion the dressing of men who don't resemble tryouts for the next Willy Wonka remake. Today, I'd like to host a pictorial of the mostly modest (but resolutely talented) Terence Stamp:
Top two: in Modesty Blaise, as dressed by Douglas Hayward and Mr. Fish. This caper also stars Monica Vitti and Dirk Bogarde, boasts a memorable Gorillaz-sampled themesong and was high on my To-Do List, as are Stamp's memoirs
In Divina Creatura (aka The Divine Nymph, 1975), which I've also yet to see
With former lover and 1960s Face, Jean Shrimpton
I am not up to date on Mr. Stamp's oeuvre - his smaller roles in recent comedy vehicle fare notwithstanding - but every facet of his fairly protean persona regularly makes an impact. Watching him toying exasperatedly, pathetically and yet thoroughly evilly with Samantha Eggar in The Collector is always a touch uncomfortable - his character's actions are the height of confused, tortured desire yet never less than unpleasant, not unlike the emotionally beset protagonist of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Elsewhere, his cold, forceful turns in Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Steven Soderbergh's The Limey juxtapose with the likes of his camp antics in drag classic Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the curious, iconic mixture of both modes that is Superman and Superman II's General Zod (only a Swinging Sixties survivor and sex symbol could order others to kneel before him as if it was his birthright)
But on and offscreen, when it is necessary, the man can surely dress. He has a natural sort of ease in his clothing whilst suggesting little concern at all with staying fashionable. Certainly, he adapts to the prevailing winds of his eras with aplomb, but usually in the most unfussy and almost stripped down manner. Relatively speaking, that is
Even in the modern age, he remains a hat person:
Sometimes beguilingly elegant and often louchely casual, I will take one Terence Stamp over a myriad of today's on and offline men's style idols. Attitude counts
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