Putting his stamp on fame

The wispy grey hair is now his distinguished trademark. Terence Stamp is a peculiar hybrid between Cockney gent and a Mayfair natural. Women simply adore him. Men want to shake his hand.

And so it has been for the best part of four decades. He dun' good and he did it with style. Stamp for many years lived up West in a swish apartment in the Albany residence off Piccadilly. It was the kind of place where you expected Jeeves and Wooster to come strolling along the corridor. He fitted the bill very nicely indeed and shared his pad with another street-wise Jack the Lad by the name of Michael Caine.

And all he ever wanted to be was a star. He could have made it. If he had, perhaps, listened to Peter Ustinov, his co-star in Billy Budd. "He told me: `If you only stick to good things then only good will come to you.'"

He starred in too many second rate film roles, such as Far From The Madding Crowd and The Collector, where he cut a dash but failed to give of his best. He dallied with glorious women: Julie Christie, golden girl of the Sixties, Jean Shrimpton, one of the first supermodels.

Now he is the subject of a BBC documentary, Scene by Scene, this Saturday and two of his films are to be shown on the same night.

He is busy, if not exactly the star he was. He appears in commercials, he has just finished a low budget drama, Kiss and is about to make a romantic comedy Love Walked In with Dennis Leary. And, in something approaching his greater days, he appears with Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson in a Star Wars saga which is due for release next spring.

He remains a solitary figure. He currently rents an apartment in New York and is working in California. He will be 60 this year and seems totally unperturbed over having never married.

And he remains incurably nostalgic. On Julie Christie: "It's wonderful to see she is being acknowledged again with an Oscar nomination." Their romance was immortalised by Ray Davis and the Kinks, in hit song "Waterloo Sunset".

And Jean Shrimpton. He was in a "miasma of misery" when she made her sudden exit. He was so down that he told muggers to let him have it when he was robbed at gunpoint in Los Angeles. They thought he was nuts and took off.

"She was much more famous than me," he says. "I was part of her coat- tails. When she went I was suicidal. I was such a drama queen, I was emotionally immature. That was the first big love affair I had and I was knocked out of shape."

So, here were the two factors forever thereafter governing Stamp's life. The Shrimp was the woman he wanted most of all, but couldn't access. His career slumped.

"I was of that time, that era," he says, sitting in his hotel suite. "There is no disputing it. I suddenly thought I was second division. I was being offered a lot of roles as a Cockney lorry driver. Years went by and occasionally I ran out of money and had to come back to make movies. But, otherwise, I just travelled. I kept my head down."

He went to India, Bali, Singapore and Japan. He lived with locals off the beaten track. He grew a beard and tramped through the countryside never once hearing the running steps of an autograph hunter. He enjoyed himself. He tried to forget The Shrimp.

"I had a rucksack and sleeping bag," he says. "I was very passive. I went with it. I met very interesting rich and poor people. I was extremely famous in the big cities, but in the sticks they didn't know me. I was just another hippie.

The Salkinds brought Stamp back into favour in 1977 with the Superman series in which he played the villainous cardboard cut-out Zog. But from then on it was very much a mishmash of movies. Passable with Robert Redford in Legal Eagles and Michael Douglas in Wall Street to barely average in escapades such as the sci-fi drama Alien Nation.

A career lost and rekindled? He regrets having turned away Alfie and King and Country when they would have given him Hollywood cred. He insists: "I think I got it just right really. What I wanted for myself at the beginning was a long career. I wanted to be in showbiz for the rest of my life. Nothing else mattered. I feel, though, I have earned my spurs."

`Scene by Scene With Terence Stamp'. BBC2, 28 February, 9pm. `Blue' and `Far From The Madding Crowd' will be shown on the same night.