Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 26, 1994 TAG: 9411090006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Terence Stamp's film career has followed a familiar trajectory.
He got off to a fast start in the 1960s as the handsome star of films such as "Billy Budd," "Far from the Madding Crowd" and "The Collector." Those were followed by more unusual work -- "Modesty Blaise," "Blue," "Spirits of the Dead" - that have gained strong cult followings since, but were poorly received at the time.
After that he took supporting roles, often as a villain, in good films ("Superman") and bad ("The Real McCoy"). Then along comes one of those unexpected, indefinable roles in an offbeat movie that just might recharge his resume.
The man who has been known for dating some of the most beautiful women in the world is now playing Bernadette, a middle-aged transsexual woman in "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," now playing in Roanoke at The Grandin Theatre.
It's an Australian road comedy about two flamboyant transvestites (Hugo Weaving and Guy Pierce) who persuade Bernadette to join them in a trip from Sidney, through the Outback desert, to Alice Springs. Imagine "La Cage Aux Folles" meets "`Crocodile' Dundee," with Bernadette as the calm, sane center of the story.
The film has done so well at festivals that Stamp is now out on a promotional tour.
At a recent Washington, D.C., stop, he said his first reaction was not positive. "When I read the script, I was petrified at the prospect. My mind really wouldn't allow me to take it seriously."
From a working actor's point of view, the project had "all the things you're not looking for, really -- an incredibly low budget, director who's only had one feature that nobody's seen and remote Australian locations. But once I'd got through my initial reticence, I realized there was a mountain of things on the plus side, including this extraordinary energy of young Australia." The people in the film industry there are "absolutely dedicated to showing the world what they can do and how hard they're prepared to work to do it."
So he said yes, and began his research.
"I started by lowering myself into the outer manifestations. I bought women's shoes and got a full body wax. And then I came upon a book I believe to be a masterpiece, `Conundrum' by Jan Morris [a transsexual] who started life as a guy. It was a genuine insight, a revelation to me. So by the time I came into contact with transsexuals, who tend to be very private people, I was able to ask them the right questions."
When the cameras started rolling and it was time to play the role - to become Bernadette -- he found that the makeup had a lot to do with his approach to the character.
"One of the most painful things was the false nails," he explained. "They stop you from going to sleep, because the ends of your fingers are so sensitive. But they were my greatest kind of alarm clock. You only knock them once. The pain is too extreme for you ever to knock a false nail twice."
They changed the way he used his hands. "You can't pick up things the way you normally do. You can't do up your fly; you can't dry your ears; you can't pick up cash." He demonstrated by miming the way a woman might use the edge of one hand to slide coins off a table and into the other hand. Then he picked up a small cassette recorder by scooping it carefully with the lower portions of his fingers and thumb. "The false nails were a constant reminder of the female gender I was assuming."
Then there was hair.
Stamp refused to take the role until the producers agreed to one demand: "I said, if I do this, I want you to guarantee me I'll have a wonderful wig. I won't play it without a wonderful wig because hair is one of the things transsexuals have in common with women. With the ones I met, it's frequently as beautiful. They take incredible pains and have wonderful long groomed hair. So three quarters of the makeup budget went to my wig, and I oversaw its creation at every stage. The woman who made it did really inspired work.
"It was my own hair when it was on. I felt so confident in it that I could do all the things I'd seen women do."
That's when the real work started.
For a film actor, he said, "What happens between 'action' and 'cut' is generally a sort of heightened experience. An actor's brain is working on a different quality in that space. But what started happening on this movie was that huge emotions were coming out, rather than illuminating thoughts.
"Once I realized that I could trust [those emotions] and allow them to flower while the camera was turning, that gave me an unusual underlay, and I suppose that was a brief insight into how the female gender experiences life."
As for Bernadette herself, "she's not someone who just had the operation. For all intents and purposes, she's been a woman for some time, and she's a woman who's facing a time in her life when, had she been a real woman, she would have been encountering menopause. What allowed me to play her in such a laid-back way was that I was experiencing all these things." "Naturalistic acting on film is a heightened thing, whether you're histrionic and chewing the furniture, or playing a cool, sad character who's had a long painful look at life. So I felt the reason that I could appear so laid back was that there were very real, big things happening which one assumes the audience is going to feel empathetic with."
His work is paying off. "Priscilla" has been popular in limited release, and if Dustin Hoffman's "Tootsie" or Robin Williams' "Mrs. Doubtfire" are any indication, Bernadette may well put Terrence Stamp back in leading roles.
by CNB