Читать книгу Ready, Steady, Go!: Swinging London and the Invention of Cool - Shawn Levy - Страница 9

The great cities all bide by the water – rivers and oceans, or a confluence of the two. It was water that brought the people there to start with; water that made their profit-taking and empire-building possible; water that gave their poets a living metaphor for eternity, nature, change. However the centuries have altered the buildings, the goings-on, the people, the surging, sweeping, never-ending, ever-changing water is the same – the oldest, most unknowable part of a city.

The Thames, for one, is a world unto itself. Murky, swift and perilously tidal, it connects the city to the world and has done since before the Roman army first built a bridge across it in the age of the Caesars. It constitutes a third city, an ever-moving medium of trade, tourism, crime, sensation and, being water, romance. The Thames has its own police force – the world’s first – and ancient tunnels and bridges and docklands. Now and again it reminds those who live beside it that it is as much estuary as stream, flooding its banks with devastating frankness. Whole generations of families have lived by the Thames, worked it, eaten from it, died on it. Within London, they’re a breed apart, urbanite yet marine, as authentically of the place as the first people who ever knew it as home.

Tom Stamp was a Thamesman, born in Poplar, the canal-laced area of north-east London between the isthmus of the Isle of Dogs and the Cockney stronghold of Bow. His father was a Thamesman, too, and Tom followed him to sea as a teen. But marriage and fatherhood brought him back onto land. On Boxing Day 1936, Tom married Ethel Perrott, a Bow lass whom he’d met during the harvest in a Kentish hopfield – a common seasonal employment for young Cockneys. For a while, to stay near Ethel, Tom worked in town as a delivery boy. But when it became clear in ‘39 that war was imminent, and as he feared being called up to the army, back to the water he went, stoking coal in the guts of great ships, a ‘donkey man … one step up from a galley slave’, as his eldest son would describe it.

The boy was only an infant when Tom departed, and the man who returned home wasn’t the same: hellish labour had left Tom back-bent and prematurely grey. Now there would be no thought of employment on land: water work was all he could conceive. Tom returned to the stoking, in tugs on the Thames, and after fifteen years of effort was rewarded with promotion out of the bowels of the boat. By the spring of 1961, he was a tug driver.

He was working the river that May, the 23rd, and perhaps he steered as far west as Waterloo Bridge. If he had, he probably didn’t notice the little knot of newspaper reporters and photographers on the embankment surrounding a young man who was eating an ice-cream cone and trying to wrap his mind and words around a new world. It was Tom’s eldest boy, Terence, and as he sat there he was becoming famous. He was talking about a part he had in a new movie – the part of a seaman.

Terence Stamp wasn’t the first East End boy to become a Face in the ‘60s: the photographers Bailey, Donovan and Duffy preceded him, as had Vidal Sassoon. But none of them had anything like his sudden, widespread fame, an absolute rocket-to-the-moon that stunned the people around him and even the most jaundiced observers of the British celebrity scene. Within a year of that May afternoon, he was an Oscar nominee who commanded thousands of pounds a week in salary, escorted the most desirable women in London and was considered one of the most beautiful men in the world.

The metamorphosis turned even Stamp’s own head: ‘For the first three or four years of my success,’ he said, ‘I thought the ‘60s were happening only to me.’

Perhaps that was because Stamp was raised to feel one-of-a-kind. He didn’t acquire such a sense from the family’s circumstances. For most of his young life, they inhabited a typical two-up, two-down terraced house with an outside loo, on Chadwin Road, Plaistow, a working-class enclave east of Bow, albeit with a slightly genteel air. (Terence Donovan would rib him about his relatively cushy upbringing: ‘Don’t believe all that guff about Stamp being a Cockney. He was brought up in Plaistow, and that’s like chalk and cheese.’)

Rather, he was imbued with a curious notion of his special qualities by his mother, who encouraged him with nice clothes, pennies for sweets, trips to the cinema, and indulgence of his childish tastes, affectations and, when she could afford it, desires: ‘Having encouraged me to think of myself as special,’ Stamp recalled, ‘she wanted to see what I would make of myself.’ He had fantasies of being rescued from his dogsbody life by a mysterious woman in a black gown, who would pull up in a limousine, inform him that he was no Stamp but rather heir to some unclaimed fortune, and whisk him off to a new life of comforts and wonders. He was a dreamer and an introvert and, no surprise, a mother’s boy, a status driven home with the arrival on the scene of his brother Chris in 1942.

Conceived while Tom was on leave, Chris became his dad’s favourite. Terry was never, as Chris was, invited to join Tom for a day out on the tug, and where Chris was taught to scrap and fight by his father, Tom never bothered to teach his older boy how to use his fists; eventually, Stamp recalled, he stopped fighting with Chris because ‘it was too dangerous’. Indeed, though three years younger, Chris grew burlier than Terry, who was only to discover years later that his lifelong finickiness at table was a symptom of food allergies and not a tendency towards femininity.

To be fair to Tom, Ethel, too, had her doubts about her eldest boy: ‘Mum’s big fear,’ he would recall, ‘was that I would turn out to be a pansy. It was for this reason that I was never allowed to wear jeans. Apparently, during her evenings as a barmaid at the Abbey Arms she had served a male couple; the extremely feminine one had been encased in a pair of denims and this, combined with a fully made-up face, had given her a shock.’

Yet fears of this sort didn’t stop Ethel from encouraging Terry to take dancing classes or to primp in nice clothes or even, after the onset of puberty, to continue to indulge his taste for the Rupert the Bear story books of Alfred Bestall – a fancy so abhorrent to Tom that he was once actually caught in the act of throwing one of Terry’s beloved volumes out with the rubbish. (Years later, still atavistically enthralled by thoughts of his beloved Rupert, Stamp tried to buy a bear cub from Harrod’s as a pet at a time when he was sharing a flat with another young actor, fellow by the name of Caine. His mate put his foot down: ‘It’s a bear, and they bloody well grow up!’)

At school Stamp evinced no special attitude or ambition – ‘I don’t know about you, Stamp. You’re a monkey puzzle,’ a teacher told him. He drifted into acting in a local amateur drama group, managing the rare trick of being singled out for opprobrium in a small East London newspaper for his brief performance. Sent to the local gymnasium to build up his body, he found a group of friends and a sport – table tennis, as it turned out, another point of worry for his distrustful dad, who had taken to calling his oldest son ‘Lord Flaunt’ – after Little Lord Fauntleroy – for his vanity.

Stamp also tried his hand at being a golf pro – another means, perhaps, of fulfilling his mother’s intuition that he would stand out. But he flopped and soon was taken down to the Youth Employment Bureau, where he was pointed towards a job as a boy Friday – messenger with an advertising firm in Cheapside, just east of St Paul’s and the farthest west in the city he’d ever ventured regularly in his life. He was 16 years old, and he had no clue where he was going.

One night a year or so later, as he sat nicely dressed in the family’s tiny front room watching the new television Tom and Ethel had managed to acquire, he came to the conviction that the English actors he was watching weren’t particularly skilled at their profession. He’d had this impression previously, but this time he voiced it: ‘I could do better than that myself!’

Tom, still unsure about the boy, turned firmly towards him: ‘People like us don’t do things like that,’ he declared. And then, before Stamp could offer a rebuttal, he nailed the door shut: ‘Just don’t talk about it anymore. I don’t want you to even think about it.’

‘He didn’t say it unkindly,’ Stamp recalled. ‘In retrospect, I’m sure he felt he was saving me a lot of heartache. I never spoke about it again.’

So he kept on at the ad game, rising – through some lies about his experience and a combined talent for handwriting and mimicry – to the rank of typographer at a more toity firm in Soho. He had taken to lazing about the West End after work, becoming a semi-regular at movie houses and chatting up the sorts of girls he would never meet back at home. Gaining a taste for this new life, he did something few in his situation would have dared: he found a cheap flat at a posh address on Harley Street, where Mayfair’s priciest doctors lived—and he moved away from Plaistow.

It was a stunning decision – another thing ‘people like us’ never did – and Stamp’s own closest friend, with whom he’d planned the getaway, couldn’t find the nerve to make the leap with him at the crucial moment, choosing to continue living with his parents. Later, reflecting on the limited horizons bred into his fellow East Enders, Stamp could get huffy: ‘They’re scared of nothing except being told they’re putting on airs and acting posh. And that stops them from trying to do anything. They’re smart and good-looking and sharp and tough as nails. But the nits waste their lives because they don’t know that there’s so much lying around waiting to be picked up by the boy with a bit of talent.’

But that was the movie star talking, the toast of the trattorias and the discotheques, and he hadn’t been born yet. This Terence Stamp was still a vague young wanderer, killing a year before his compulsory military service with life as a would-be among the rich and swell.

It turned out that the army didn’t want him – flat feet, or something. The guaranteed two years of regimentation and routine vanished – poof! It was like a free play on life’s pinball machine, and Stamp determined to use it audaciously. He’d been musing along with a buddy from work about taking acting classes. Now he would reward himself with two years’ pursuit of the chimera of a thespian career. He’d be no worse off, he reckoned, than if he’d spent two years on a rifle range or digging latrines.

It being the ‘50s and he a James Dean fan, he decided to study the Method and signed up with guru Jos Tregoningo’s Dean Street studio in Soho. It was quite the hip scene, with pretty girls and even, one night, a BBC TV crew filming the exotic goings-on. Stamp and his classmates were shot performing various exercises, one of his mates standing out in particular with his impression (‘rather wonderful’, Stamp recalled) of a tree; asked by the interviewer what the experience was like, he held his pose and declared, ‘I can feel the sap rising within me.’

The Method failed, though, to answer some of Stamp’s basic questions about the acting game, and he itched for something more formal in the way of training. He and his acting mates had cottoned onto the fact that there were scholarships available at some of the really good acting schools: the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. It was at the latter that Stamp was awarded a scholarship: two years’ free tuition plus £8 per month stipend – not enough to live on, but sharing a flat and doing odd jobs, he could maintain himself reasonably as an acting student, if not yet an actor.

And so he learned ‘proper’ acting, and to earn extra money he took to stage-crewing in the big houses of theatreland: he saw the original London production of West Side Story scores of times. Then a break: he played Iago in his school’s year-end show and piqued the interest of an agent, Jimmy Fraser, an old Piccadilly hand, widely admired as an essentially decent fellow in a racket full of heels. ‘My God, that’s the sexiest Iago I’ve ever seen,’ Fraser spouted. “Thank goodness he’s not loose on the streets.’

Fraser signed Stamp up and got him work straight away: £12 a week to play a Geordie soldier in a suburban production of The Long and the Short and the Tall, the Second World War play that had launched Peter OToole to stardom. When that brief run closed, the producers decided to mount a touring version of the show, and Stamp was asked to carry on in his role. At the first cast meeting, held at the Duke of Argyll pub in Soho, he got a glimpse of the actor who would play the lead – OToole’s understudy, in fact, from the original West End production: a blond guy, insolent, sardonic and possessed of the most striking hooded blue eyes. He was several crucial years and many, many life lessons more experienced than Stamp, and he would almost right away come to dominate the younger man’s next few formative years: Maurice Micklewhite, or Michael Caine to the trade.

If Stamp had a cameo in Caine’s life story, Caine had a feature role in Stamp’s. He was six years older, he had served in the Korean War (indeed, one grim night he stood sentry at the very front of the demilitarised zone, the tip of the spear of Democracy pointed across the black abyss at the Red hordes), he was divorced – with a child – and he had dozens of film, stage and TV jobs under his belt. Stamp, always looking for gurus, now had a South London know-it-all as his personal guide to the stage life.

Caine was a little suspicious of Stamp’s wide-eyed admiration at first: ‘So you’re one of the lads, then?’ he said to him once they’d become better acquainted. ‘Blimey! I thought you were a poof!’ But he felt kinship with any fellow working-class boy with the gumption to give the acting game a go. As soon as the touring company took to the road, Caine began showing Stamp the ropes – how to get a good hotel room, the idiosyncrasies of various theatres and, most vitally, where to find the best girls in a given town. ‘Mike ran amok with sexual theory even when sitting down,’ Stamp said. When the tour neared an end, Caine mentioned he was between addresses back in London, and Stamp offered him a share of the Harley Street flat. Presently the two acquired lodgings of their own in Ennismore Gardens Mews, south of Hyde Park and east of the Royal Albert Hall in a Kensington that they had only inhabited in dreams.

Here the modernisation of Terence Stamp began: Caine introduced him to the latest novels, movies, coffee bars. They would plan whole days around doing nothing: where to nurse a cup of tea for hours, which library to haunt to read the newspapers, whether to spring for two lamb sandwiches for lunch or just the one, which pub or party or night spot was aptest to yield up a pair of game young ladies (Stamp was in awe of Caine’s skill as a puller of birds). There were auditions and calls to their agents and now and again the flickering prospect of good work; Caine gave Stamp hints and wise advice that constituted something of a makeshift master class in acting; they even – decades before their time – wrote a screenplay together, ‘You Must Be Joking’, about two South London lads who try to break out of their native world. Mostly, as Stamp recalled, there were the luxuries of time and time spent together: ‘The young Mike Caine was heaven to be with.’ And in some ways, he was as happy during these lean days as he ever would be.

They were working together in a Wimbledon theatre in the spring of ‘61, playing in the première of one of the very rare misses in the ascendant career of songwriter Lionel Bart, Why the Chicken, when Stamp got an excited call from Jimmy Fraser. He was to report to an office in Golden Square, Soho, that afternoon: Peter Ustinov wanted him to audition for the new film he was directing, Billy Budd.

‘What’s the part?’ Stamp asked.

‘The lead: Billy Budd.’

He couldn’t believe his ears: They must really be scraping the barrel if they want to see me!’

Fraser levelled with him: They are. They’ve already seen every young actor in town.’

P.S.: He got the part. Ustinov met him and had him read and asked him to come back for a screen test the next day. He took a quick lesson from Caine in how to respond to the intimidating presence of a camera (he’d never even acted for TV before), he wore one of his dad’s old sweaters from the navy for good luck and he was off. With the camera rolling, Ustinov asked him to listen to a heap of abuse and false charges and not respond – just as Herman Melville’s seaman Budd is unable to respond to a slander and is thereby impelled into striking an officer. Relying on a bit of Method trickery, Stamp recalled how he felt when he was unfairly caned at school and had, mutely, to take it. When the test was over, Ustinov came and patted his cheek: That was … tumultuous.’

A little time passed; Stamp despaired, thinking he’d made a botch of so good a chance; but then he heard: he was in. And Ustinov chose to kick off the production with a splashy press conference to introduce his handsome young Cockney leading player to the world. The setting was a lunch-time cocktail party at the Savoy. Wearing his second-ever suit, a shirt borrowed from Lionel Bart, and hair that had just recently been dyed blond for the movie, Stamp stepped into the limelight on 23 May 1961, telling his brief life story while enjoying an ice-cream along the river on which his father was busy at work.

The next day newspapers carried accounts of ‘Tugboat Terry’ – a name, Stamp recalled, ‘that would cling like a hair in my mouth’.

Months later, when he came home to London after filming Billy Budd in Spain, Stamp quickly recognised that the world immediately around him was changing. It wasn’t only the instant fame that the papers heaped at his feet. The city itself and all the young, creative people in it were moving in heady new ways.

His flatmate, Caine, always with an ear to the ground, had heard of a hot new club, the Saddle Room, where the patroness, a former flame of Prince Philip’s named Helen Cordet, egged her customers into trying the new dance craze, the Twist. ‘Can’t get in there,’ Caine explained. ‘It’s a real toffee place, full of high-class crumpet.’ But Stamp was no longer some East End bum with neither prospects nor sway. He told Caine to get dressed and not worry; when they arrived at the club, he told the doorman ‘I’m Stamp, and he’s with me,’ and bang: in they were.

It was like that everywhere. La Discotheque (where a couple of notorious bad girls, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, caught his eye), the best restaurants, posh shops: Stamp’s face was his passport to everything. It almost didn’t matter that, as he showed in Billy Budd, he could act, and act well. He was a one-man vanguard, embodying whatever sense there was in the culture at large that young Britons had arrived. Flush with instant success, drunk on fame, Stamp entered the commotion in early midstream but at full pace. He could rightly consider himself the centre – the first of a new generation to make it smashingly big.

And you couldn’t blame him. His role in Billy Budd, effectively his debut, would garner him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor and worldwide recognition. He was in the middle of something that he had no way to grasp – nor, indeed, could anyone else. Taken up by the press as a symbol of a new wave in British life, he was presented as a standard of his generation, and he was perfectly willing to tell the press as much: ‘People like me, we’re the moderns,’ he pronounced. ‘We wear elastic-sided boots and we smoke Gauloises, we work hard and we play hard. We have no class and no prejudice. We’re the new swinging Englishmen. And it’s people like me who are spreading the word.’

It wasn’t just in England that people were noticing, either, in his view. Though he’d barely seen the world, he spoke as if he understood perfecdy his place in it: ‘There’s a new kind of Englishman that I think the general public will be interested in,’ he declared. ‘He’s very masculine, very swinging, very aware, well-dressed and all that but with great physical and mental strength. He’s the working-class boy with a few bob as opposed to the chinless wonder. French girls and American girls used to look on Englishmen as idiots because they only saw the ones that could afford to travel. Now they’re seeing the new type and they think they’re great.’ And no one, in his view, was more a paragon of this new English animal than he: ‘I would like to start a Terence Stamp trend, but of course to do this I would have to be in a more important position than I am now.’

That was a foolish young man talking, of course, unused to having microphones in his face and great swathes of history to describe for the world’s consumption. In later years, Stamp would explain more eloquently what that adrenalin-drunk whelp was thinking: ‘The whole point of the ‘60s was that it was like coming out of prison. I was twenty-two when the ‘60s started. I just couldn’t have been better placed. The working class were just dogsbodies up until then. Suddenly we were Jack the lads. Everybody wanted to be like us. I can’t begin to express what it was like after the Pill and before AIDS. It was a golden section.’

Ah, the Pill.

When he was cast in Billy Budd, Stamp was emerging as a sexual being, engaging in one-off trysts with fellow acting students and an ongoing fling with a wealthy Chelsea girl who lived near the flat he shared with Caine, but he was certainly no one’s idea of Casanova. By the following summer, with his face on movie screens and all over newspapers, his sexual horizons had become seemingly limitless.

The eagle-eyed Caine beheld with wonder his flatmate’s astounding success with women. With the boost their household finances had received from Stamp’s film work – Budd was immediately followed by a turn as a juvenile delinquent in Term of Trial, on which set Stamp was snubbed by Laurence Olivier – their ménage had shifted to a flat on Ebury Street, an address close enough to Chelsea to put them right in the heart of the burgeoning new scene. As opposed to their tiny one-bedroom flat in Ennismore Garden Mews, where they’d perfected a trick of pulling the other’s mattress, bed linen and all, into the sitting room at one fell (and, to some dollies’ eyes, alarmingly proficient) swoop, here they each had a room, with Stamp, the rent-payer, claiming the larger. But the extra room couldn’t quite make up for the added female traffic occasioned by Stamp’s new fame and money.

‘For the first time,’ Caine recalled, ‘I saw what an irresistible aphrodisiac these two can be when combined … The succession of individual dolly birds turned into a flock and I was the flight controller. Getting them in and out of the very busy airfield that our flat had become, without collision, meant keeping them on a very narrow and definite flight path…The job, though stressful, was not without its compensations as the odd damsel in distress was guided, as an emergency, onto my own private runway, bedroom two.’

As Stamp’s reputation and confidence grew, he became almost frighteningly successful as a seducer, even in the eyes of so jaundiced an observer as Caine. There was the time, for instance, when Caine came home perturbed because, as he explained to Stamp, he’d heard a rumour that the two of them were homosexual lovers. Stamp asked who’d been spreading the rumour, and Caine gave him the names, then became alarmed that his friend was going to try to sort the gossips out with his fists. Stamp had no such plan. A few weeks later, he came into the apartment in a merry mood: ‘Remember all those blokes who said we were queers?’ he asked Caine. ‘Well, I’ve screwed all their girlfriends!’

For all his newfound bacchanalian proficiency, Stamp still retained his youthful dreaminess and persisted in falling in love with great beauties he’d seen on TV or in magazines. At times, he was brilliantly successful in seeing these schoolboy crushes through to grown-up affairs. There was Julie Christie, whom he’d swooned over in a TV commercial before she was a name and met through Caine, who knew her through a few connections he had in the business; after a whirlwind romance, Stamp found himself dumped when Christie went off to Bradford to make Billy Liar and become a star. Presently, he hooked up with Catherine Milinaire, an assistant editor at The Queen and stepdaughter of the Duke of Bedford. The romance was, in Stamp’s mind, indicative of the great changes going on in English society: ‘Some yobbo like me could get into the Saddle Room and dance with the Duchess of Bedford’s daughter, and get hold of her, and get taken down to Woburn Abbey to hang out for a long weekend and have dinner in the Canaletto room with the Duke’s sons!’

And all this while, there was another girl he had in mind: doe-eyed, long-legged, with a pert expression and a modern mien and yet somehow comfortably suited to all the lovely clichés about what an English girl ought to be. He’d seen her in the fashion pages and advertisements in magazines and was smitten. And he knew he wasn’t alone. ‘Her cover shots were pinned to the underside of prefects’ desks and bedsit walls across the country,’ he recalled. Caine warned him off, telling him that the girl – Jean Shrimpton – was living with the photographer who took most of those shots, David Bailey; Bailey had even left his wife and set up house with Stamp’s dream girl. ‘Sounds like they’re almost cut-and-carried,’ Caine told him. ‘Besides, I hear he hails from down your manor. Probably a nice bloke.’

Ah well, another dream …

Aside from becoming terribly famous and getting laid in grand houses, of course, Stamp set about the work of finding a follow-up to Billy Budd – no small matter in itself. Following the advice of Peter Ustinov, Stamp had grown picky – indeed, difficult – in selecting new parts, demanding £4000 for a mere ten days of work on Term of Trial.

The producer of that film was Jimmy Woolf, a garrulous, outsized figure who was the son of a producer and the brother and business partner of another. For Stamp, who’d never had much support for his acting ambitions at home, the oversized Woolf was to become a Falstaffian mentor, popping pills, smoking cigars and dispensing insights into the film industry that, in Stamp’s mind, trumped even Michael Caine’s canny advice. ‘He became the superbright adult I’d always wanted in my life,’ Stamp admitted. ‘I was dazzled by the man’s brilliance. Other friendships appeared childlike by comparison.’

Woolf, in fact, tried explicitly to prise Stamp away from Caine’s ministrations, particularly from Caine’s advice that Stamp take any job that came along. ‘Michael Caine is not you,’ Woolf told him when Stamp reported over one of their frequent lunches together that his flatmate was suggesting he should take a part he’d been offered. ‘Michael Caine would do anything. Stars are choosy, they only come out at night. There are lots of fine British actors, but not so many stars. Don’t be in such a rush.’

And so he turned up his nose at such pictures as Youngblood Hawke, a Hollywood adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel about a hot young writer and the mean old publishing world. After the producers offered him £30,000 to sign and £250 a week while working, he said, ‘They sent me the script. It was bad enough reading the lines in this room. To get up in a studio and say them would have been impossible. Far too embarrassing. I turned it down. Being Americans they thought it wasn’t enough money. So they offered double. I still couldn’t do it.’ (Imagine Caine’s horror upon reading that in the paper!)

Hounded by a press that wanted to know when he’d follow up Budd, Stamp complained that the industry wasn’t making it possible for him: “You know, the only two English actors they think they can build up internationally are OToole and me. I reckon I’m now worth around £30,000 a picture and the reason I’ve done nothing this last year is that I’ve been offered nothing but rubbish.’

But the truth wasn’t so much that he’d priced himself out of work as that he’d grown too much to believe Woolf’s protestations that he was utterly unique. By 1964, when, two years after Billy Budd, he was still sifting through offers indifferently, everywhere around him the careers of young English actors were taking off. And he – the most handsome and among the most talented – was putting himself in danger of being left out.

In the wake of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and the 1959 film of it, a string of movies about the hard times and rough passions of young men and women of the provinces revived the British film much in the way the nouvelle vague was reviving the French. ‘Kitchen sink’ cinema, as it came to be called, featured a crop of young performers who, though in many cases classically trained, lacked the homogenising polish associated previously with fine British acting: Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Rita Tushingham, Oliver Reed, Alan Bates. Regional actors with regional voices, they crashed into the public eye playing drunks and lashers-out and fornicators, characters who railed, like Look Back in Anger’s Jimmy Porter, against the age-old system yet succumbed to it, sometimes out of choice, just as often out of erosive inevitability. In the ironic way of the times, they were becoming glitzy media stars, celebrated by the very social and economic machinery their films decried.

Lynn Redgrave, although not a classic beauty, was one beneficiary of these changes. ‘I became an actor, I suppose, at a lucky time,’ she admitted. “The young actors suddenly weren’t aspiring to skip through the French doors looking beautiful. There was this new style of acting. It wasn’t really new, because great acting was always great acting. But suddenly people did behaviour. They didn’t just stand in the perfect position looking beautiful.’

The movies these actors starred in were, picture for picture, as strong as any national cinema had to offer: Room at the Top, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, This Sporting Life, A Kind of Loving, A Taste of Honey, Billy Liar, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Tom Jones, The Damned, The Leather Boys. If, as a group, they seemed to condemn English life and traditions, they also made a great case for London as the capital of world cinema, with new directors availing themselves of some of the techniques that had been developed in the French nouvelle vague or Italian neorealismo and an impressive corps of actors who could play classical or modern with equal flair. At the same time, as the result of arcane legal and financial obligations, American film companies found themselves making more and more films in Europe, England in particular.

With all this activity, and with the public’s new appreciation of lower-class and provincial actors, directors and stories, the early ‘60s marked the first time in the history of British film, when a native performer could become a real international star without having at least one foot in classical drama or serious stage work. And Stamp, who was, for a while, among the most promising of faces in this great new bloom of English cinema, patiently followed Jimmy Woolf’s advice that he only accept the plummiest of parts – much to the suspicion of Stamp’s friends, who thought that Woolf would rather have had the actor as a regular lunch date than see him work steadily. Stamp suspected as much: ‘Although I knew he was somehow preventing me from working,’ he admitted later on, ‘I didn’t care: I thought I could handle it. Jimmy Woolf must have laughed. He read me like a book. Spun me like a top.’

And yet, finally, an offer came that even Woolf agreed Stamp should not ignore. In the midst of a stupendous age for British cinema, with the whole world looking to Britain for new directions in film technique, in acting and in style, Stamp agreed to go off to Los Angeles and act for William Wyler, who’d been directing Hollywood movies since 1925.

The film was The Collector, and it was actually a hell of a good project. Wyler, of course, was a giant, with a resume that included such works as Dead End, Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, Roman Holiday and Ben-Hur. His new picture was based on John Fowles’ internationally bestselling, prize-winning novel. Stamp was cast in the role of Freddie Clegg, a wormy little clerk who wins a fortune on the football pools and then spends the money on a scheme to kidnap a woman and convince her to love him: a terrific chance for Stamp to expand his screen persona beyond the strong, decent, stuttering angel that was Billy Budd. Playing opposite his old drama school chum (and Budd première date) Samantha Eggar, Stamp would reinvent himself as a twisted, obsessive sociopath, as far a cry as could be imagined from his last role – and, presumably, from himself.

He had dreamed up an entirely new life.