Discovering Stamp — all he contained, all he accomplished, and all he held back — over the next four decades was an invigorating experience. He was stunningly singular, and dead, dead sexy. I’d like to think he could’ve been a bigger star, but I’m also grateful he never got shoehorned into more than a few lousy movies as a lead. For the most part, when Stamp appeared, he belonged and the movie immediately became worth our time and attention.

I didn’t begin to get a measure of Stamp as an actor until my high school English teacher, Joyce Rucker, screened Peter Ustinov’s film of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” I got it fairly quickly. Our classroom turned into a sauna. There was swooning and cis-het aspiring, but Stamp was impossible. We could never have that, nor could we be that. Ustinov’s “Billy Budd” is not a conventionally sexy film (it is, after all, directed by Ustinov, who was to eroticism what Chris Dudley was to free-throw shooting), nor is William Wyler’s “The Collector,” but you came away from both craving more Stamp.

Stamp was imposing in his “Superman” movies, and a tough, blue-eyed avenger in Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey.” But those performances become less interesting (though no less effective) when you factor in the psychological complexity of his 1960s work in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema,” Ken Loach’s “Poor Cow” and his portrayal of an alcoholic actor in Federico Fellini’s “Toby Dammit” (a piece of the arthouse anthology “Spirits of the Dead”).

Post-Zod, “The Limey” excepted, Stamp strategically allowed himself to be used. He’s complicit and fully engaged in Stephen Frears’ “The Hit”, Michael Cimino’s “The Sicilian” and Frank Oz’s “Bowfinger,” and, upon entering the entering the last stage of his career, he was a blast in Peyton Reed’s “Yes Man,” and George Nolfi’s “The Adjustment Bureau.” I’m so happy his countryman Edgar Wright got Stamp for his swan song, “Last Night in Soho,” where Stamp played a silver-haired ghost. 

From his very first performance, Stamp haunted us. We loved him as Zod, but we fell in love with him, against our better judgment, in films like “The Collector.” I can’t really quantify Terence Stamp, but I will forever welcome him into my dreams… or nightmares… or those enchanting spaces in between.

And as long as I gaze on “Waterloo Sunset,” I’ll be in paradise.