Terence Stamp, actor who played 'Superman' villain Zod, dies at 87

London: Terence Stamp liked to recall how he was on the verge of becoming a tantric sex teacher at an ashram in India when, in 1977, he received a telegram from his London agent with news that he was being considered for the Superman film.

"I was on the night flight the next day," Stamp said in an interview with his publisher Watkins Books in 2015.

After eight years largely out of work, getting the role of the arch-villain General Zod in Superman and Superman II turned the full glare of Hollywood's limelight on the Londoner.

Buoyed by his new role, Stamp said he would respond to curious looks from passers-by with a command of: "Kneel before Zod, you bastards," which usually went down a storm.

He died on Sunday morning, aged 87, his family said in a statement. The cause was not immediately known.

"He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, both as an actor and as a writer that will continue to touch and inspire people for years to come," the family statement said.

'I would have been laughed at'

Terence Henry Stamp was born in London's East End in 1938, the son of a tugboat coal stoker and a mother who Stamp said gave him his zest for life. As a child he endured the bombing of the city during World War Two and the deprivations that followed.

"The great blessing of my life is that I had the really hard bit at the beginning because we were really poor," he said.

He left school to work initially as a messenger boy for an advertising firm and quickly moved up the ranks before he won a scholarship to go to drama school. Until then he had kept his acting ambitions secret from his family for fear of disapproval.

"I couldn't tell anyone I wanted to be an actor because it was out of the question. I would have been laughed at," he said.

He shared a flat with another young London actor, Michael Caine, and landed the lead role in director Peter Ustinov's 1962 adaptation of Billy Budd, a story of brutality in the British navy in the 18th century. That role earned him an Academy Award nomination and filled him with pride.

"To be cast by somebody like Ustinov was something that gave me a great deal of self-confidence in my film career," Stamp told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2019. "During the shooting, I just thought, 'Wow! This is it'."

Famous for his good looks and impeccable dress sense, he formed one of Britain's most glamorous couples with Julie Christie, with whom he starred in Far From the Madding Crowd in 1967. But he said the love of his life was the model Jean Shrimpton.

"When I lost her, then that also coincided with my career taking a dip," he said.

After failing to land the role of James Bond to succeed Sean Connery, Stamp sought a change of scene. He appeared in Italian films and worked with Federico Fellini in the late 1960s.

"I view my life really as before and after Fellini," he said. "Being cast by him was the greatest compliment an actor like myself could get."

'A lot of action going on'

It was while working in Rome – where he appeared in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem in 1968 and A Season in Hell in 1971 - that Stamp met Indian spiritual speaker and writer Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1968. Krishnamurti taught the Englishman how to pause his thoughts and meditate, prompting Stamp to study yoga in India.

Mumbai was his base but he spent long periods at the ashram in Pune, dressed in orange robes and growing his hair long, while learning the teachings of his yogi, including tantric sex.

"There was a rumour around the ashram that he was preparing me to teach the tantric group," he said in the 2015 interview with Watkins Books. "There was a lot of action going on."

After landing the role of General Zod, the megalomaniacal leader of the Kryptonians, in Superman in 1978 and its sequel in 1980, both times opposite Christopher Reeves, he went on to appear in a string of other films, including as a transgender woman in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994.

Other films included Valkyrie with Tom Cruise in 2008, The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon in 2011 and movies directed by Tim Burton.

He counted Princess Diana among his friends.

"It wasn't a formal thing, we'd just meet up for a cup of tea, or sometimes we'd have a long chat for an hour. Sometimes it would be very quick," he told the Daily Express newspaper in 2017. "The time I spent with her was a good time."

In 2002, Stamp married for the first time at the age of 64 -- to Elizabeth O'Rourke, a pharmacist, who was 35 years his junior. They divorced in 2008.

Asked by the Stage 32 website how he got film directors to believe in his talent, Stamp said: "I believed in myself.

"Originally, when I didn't get cast I told myself there was a lack of discernment in them. This could be considered conceit. I look at it differently. Cherishing that divine spark in myself."