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Last Update : 30/4/15

I’ve always admired Terence Stamp as an actor unafraid of playing his age. He is possessed of a modesty that verges on the self-deprecating, even if his hair loss rankles..

Oscar-nominated for his screen debut in Peter Ustinov’s film of Herman Melville’s ‘Billy Budd’ (1962), before becoming one of the defining actors of swinging 60s Britain, Stamp was also associated with some of the most beautiful women of their day, like Jean Shrimpton and Julie Christie.

Roles in Ken Loach’s ‘Poor Cow’ (1967) and John Schlesinger’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ (1967), earned him critical acclaim, yet sadly, when he finally committed to marriage at the age of 64, he chose a woman 35 years younger than him. Predictably, the union was over after five years, with unreasonable behaviour on his part being cited during the divorce proceedings. It could have been down to mental and physical cruelty, but my money’s on him leaving copies of ‘Readers Digest’ lying around on the lounge carpet.

When leading man roles dried up, he merely adjusted to a career as a character actor rather than a top-billed star, continually seeking out creatively interesting projects – starring as a retired gangster living in Spain in Stephen Frears’s ‘The Hit’ (1984), a transsexual in the Australian road movie, ‘The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert’ (1994), and, most recently, as an ageing husband coming to terms with his wife’s illness in Paul Andrew Williams’s ‘Song for Marion’ (2012). When he threatened to break Michael Douglas in two in ‘Wall Street,’ there was nothing if not the merest suggestion that, faced with a similar confrontation, you’d take him at his word!

Stamp has lived a strangely nomadic existence for more than thirty years. By his own admission, he never knows where he’ll be staying in a month’s time. “I have good chums all over the place, so I just pick up on what’s happening. And if no-one is around, I’ll just go off to another hotel. Home is where my head is.” Many might find this a strange rootless existence, yet property ownership brings with it, innumerable problems – some unexpected – and considerable responsibility. I suspect that had I ever sold up for long enough, the thought of reacquiring property would not have appealed. It’s a millstone around one’s neck; after all, most of us would not consider liposuction, botex, facelifts etc yet we feel a yearly commitment to property maintenance. “We must do something this year” is a common phrase every man hears from his partner each spring, “the house is looking so run down!”

This is also a man equally capable of an ascetic existence. When his career hit the rocks in the early 70’s, he simply abandoned acting for nearly nine years, returning from life in an ashram to appear in the ‘Superman’ movie with Marlon Brando and Christopher Reeve. Arriving on set still bearded and with shoulder length hair, Brando – a man who valued his own privacy on his Tahitian island – was the first to enquire of the 60’s hearthrob – “What have you been up to then?”

His attitude to money had changed. Years of living in an ashram had demonstrated clearly that he could live without it. He had also come to realise something else about himself. Children, house, commitment, stability…none of it was for him. “Perhaps I’d known that from the start, although maybe I hadn’t acknowledged it. I always saw myself as a kind of strolling player, travelling about, and that was part of the price of the trip, as far as I was concerned.”

I can understand some of his sentiments. I went three months recently (Dec 20014 -Feb 2015) without owning a mobile phone because quite simply, I didn’t need one. The experience was wonderful. At once, I was liberated from that idle curiosity that bedevils all owners. Have I missed a call? Was that MY phone going off? Have I fully used my allocation of monthly minutes? Have I got my phone with me? Is it fully charged? I absolutely hate the thing. I felt liberated, as if living in a different time zone. “What if your car breaks down?” people would say. “They’ll come soon enough to move me” I would respond. I’d like to jettison other acoutrements of the modern world. What on earth, for example, encourages individuals to upload private photos, documents and other paraphernalia onto cyberspace storage systems, only to find their security compromised and their belongings made public? Type in the word cloud in any search engine and you’ll find nothing about nimbus. I’ll never ‘get it,’ in every sense of the word.