In 1965 he took the part of the nonentity who kidnaps a girl in the adaptation of the John Fowles book The Collector because the great William Wyler was directing, but he wasn’t really right for it. Peter Ustinov cast him in Billy Budd in 1962, which won him an Oscar nomination. I wasn’t ready for a twin-soul relationship.’ He hasn’t seen her since, though he remains friends with Christie.ĭirectors, as well as women, were throwing themselves at him. She left me because she saw I was a lunatic. And I kind of knew it at the time, but I was driven,’ he says. As well as Bardot and Christie he dated Jean Shrimpton, the original supermodel, who left David Bailey for him, and who he once said was the love of his life. The same with grass: I’d be stoned instantly.’ ‘I was anyone’s after a couple of Scotches. Stamp says he wasn’t really much of a womaniser also, that he never got seriously into drink and drugs in the 1960s because he had to stay sharp and fit to keep up with the older Caines and Finneys and O’Tooles. They shared a room with twin beds, so when either took a girl home - ‘more often him’ - Caine would dump his mattress and sheets in the living room behind the sofa to signal that each should withdraw to his separate territory. ‘He has very different memories of a lot of events than me, but maybe that’s me getting it wrong.’ Is he saying that Caine lies about his age? ‘I don’t know,’ Stamp smiles. At this point, Stamp smirks and makes a ‘higher, higher’ gesture with his hand. So when he was excused National Service due to problems with his feet (he had his shoes handmade later in life), he decided to give acting a go.Īfter another scholarship, to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in South Kensington, he did a tour of Willis Hall’s Second World War drama The Long and the Short and the Tall and moved into a flat, first in Harley Street and then in Ennismore Gardens Mews, with his co-star Michael Caine, who was six years older. But he’d wanted to act since seeing Gary Cooper in Beau Geste as a child, and James Dean in East of Eden as a teenager. The first of his family to win a scholarship to grammar school, he went to work for an advertising agency (‘Knit faster with Knitmaster’ was one of his slogans). So he bought a padlock for his wardrobe door.’ Stamp’s laughter is a wonderful thing.Īnyway, Stamp was part of the generation who escaped. My mother told me his mother was an alcoholic and she would pawn his clothes. ‘He was so poor but when he had a suit made it was f***ing great - dove grey, gabardine. ‘I remembered all the things I got from Tom, how stylish he was,’ says Stamp. In his most recent film, Song for Marion, Stamp played a grumpy pensioner who takes the place of his wife (Vanessa Redgrave) in an oldies’ choir after she dies of cancer, and based his performance on his distant, emotionally buttoned-up dad Tom. His old tailor ‘Fred the Stitch’ made suits for him in a 1960s, 1970s and 1990s style for the sci-fi caper The Adjustment Bureau, but he was secretly pleased when the producer supplied him with another by the Italian firm Loro Piana. Fashion didn’t exist.’ These days he’ll go to Anderson & Sheppard if he needs a sweater or a pair of trousers cut ‘for real men’. ‘I always knew what I wanted, and it wasn’t what others wanted,’ he says. At 15, he was telling a Brick Lane tailor to put his buttonhole on the right, not the left, lapel. He may have grown up ‘proper poor, with lino, a scullery and no bathroom’ but he remembers dragging his mother Ethel down Commercial Road aged about three looking for the perfect outfit. The eldest of five, born in Stepney in 1938, and raised first in Bow, then Plaistow when wartime bombs started falling, Stamp always knew how to dress. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.
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