Terence Stamp's summer camp - actor - Interview

He made his screen debut radiating angelic innocence in Billy Budd (1962), but it was his performance as the sociopathic entomologist in The Collector (1965) that cemented Terence Stamp's reputation as a virtuoso in the field of brooding menace. A leading luminary of the now-mythic period when London swung, he proved as adept in period pieces (Far from the Madding Crowd, 1967) as in kitchen-sink dramas (Poor Cow, 1967), and found a niche in Italy working for Fellini (Spirits of the Dead, 1968) and Pasolini (Teorema, 1968).

In his new film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, he plays Bernadette, the transsexual den mother in a trio of drag queens stranded in the Australian outback. In person, the silver-thatched Stamp is given to long periods of silent deliberation, but, as traces of a Cockney accent work their way through his cultured tones, he gradually warms to his theme.

JONATHAN BERNSTEIN: Your character, Bernadette, drifts through The Adventures of Priscilla with a world-weary hauteur that doesn't change whether she's drinking an old bag under the table or kneeing a local lout in the groin.

TERENCE STAMP: I wanted Bernadette to have reached a kind of a watershed, and to be focused inwardly in the way that somebody is who has taken a direction in their life and is nearer the end than the beginning. That was something I used to tether her, on top of which there was the irony, the bitterness, the sarcasm--all bound up with this search for identification that I though would manifest earlier in a transsexual than in a normal person. A normal person doesn't have to worry about who they are until they're about fifty. Somebody who is born into the wrong body is aware of that very early. Most of the transsexuals I spoke to seemed to have been fairly certain by the time they were three or four years old that they absolutely were girls.

JB: I accepted you totally as a woman in the film, so I was surprised when flashes of masculinity showed through.

TS: I have to give the director [Stephan Elliott] credit for that. He didn't want a woman, he wanted a transsexual. One of the things he found really interesting was that there is always a moment when the masculine persona manifests itself in a flash. In my research, I wanted to know how transsexuals become what they are outwardly. They learn. They tie their legs together to remind them to take little steps. They have a way of modulating their voices. Yeah, I would have liked to have looked a lot more beautiful, I would have liked to have looked like Silvana Mangano or Rita Hayworth. The reality was, I didn't.

JB: Every actor who drags up becomes a martyr, complaining about the agony he has to endure. Bearing in mind your elaborate costumes and wiggage, you probably have more cause for complaint than most.

TS: Tucking is extremely uncomfortable for hours on end. Most queens tuck for ten minutes when they're doing their routines. Our costumes were sewn on to us--when you were tucked, you were tucked. Liquid intake had to be measured. It struck me that most things that women endure are uncomfortable, but there's a plus side to that, and in my case the most uncomfortable thing was the fingernails, which were quite excruciatingly painful to wear. If you knock them, you'll never knock them again because it's as though your nails have been pulled off. Having said that, the most painful things are the most efficient reminders of the female persona, so once I'd got the nails on and I'd got used to them, they became a terrific alarm clock because you can't use your hands in a masculine way. You can't pull up your fly, you can't clean your ears.

JB: If The Collector, with its theme of female objectification taken to outlandish extremes, were made today, it would be greeted with storms of feminist outrage.

TS: Within the story of The Collector there is this social sting. What John Fowles was saying in the novel was that if society doesn't take it upon itself to become more humane, this is what's going to happen--and it has come to pass. It's not anything about feminism. Feminism is just an aspect of fragmentary thinking, which is what Fowles was partly addressing.

JB: That film also dealt a death blow to the angel in the sailor suit you played in Billy Budd. Since then, you've been the epitome of evil.

TS: I think it's been rather disappointing. One of the things that attracted me to The Collector was that it was going to prevent me from being typecast as a Billy Budd-type character, which I anticipated being very boring. If I'd known it was going to condemn me to a lifetime of playing psychopaths, I might have had second thoughts. It's equally tedious. Villains are not very well written because they're low on the scale of importance--they just drive the plot along. The drawback to that is, it becomes increasingly difficult to bring any subtext to those parts. The only reason they try to get capable actors to play villains is because they're badly written.

JB: You were in two of my all-time favorite films, which we will now discuss. First, Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise [1966]: eccentric, hilarious, evocative of the era. I assume it was crucified on its release.