Day: August 18, 2025

“My only regrets,” the Oscar-nominated British actor Terence Stamp once said, “are the films that I passed on because I was fearful.”

Stamp, who was best known for starring as the villain General Zod in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980), has often called turning down the lead role in the 1967 Oscar-winning movie adaptation of Broadway hit Camelot—because he wasn’t confident in his ability to sing—his biggest regret.

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But the actor, who died Sunday at age 87, took on no shortage of fearless roles later in his career and even got the opportunity to overcome his trepidation about singing onscreen when he starred in the 2012 film Song for Marion, earning a Best Actor nomination at the British Independent Film Awards for his portrayal of a widower in a seniors’ choir.

Stamp’s family confirmed his death in a statement to Reuters, saying that 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.”

Described by the Guardian as the “seductive dark prince of British cinema,” Stamp had a film career that spanned decades. He was also a prolific writer, authoring five memoirs as well as a fiction novel and co-authoring two cookbooks.

“Terence was kind, funny, and endlessly fascinating,” said Edgar Wright, who directed Stamp in the 2021 film Last Night in Soho, in an Instagram tribute to the late actor. “Terence was a true movie star: the camera loved him, and he loved it right back.”

Bill Duke, who acted alongside Stamp in Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 film The Limey, posted on Facebook that Stamp “brought a rare intensity to the screen” but “carried himself with warmth, grace, and generosity” off-screen. Stamp’s artistry, Duke said, “left an indelible mark on cinema, and his spirit will live on through the unforgettable characters he gave us.”

Billy Budd and (almost) James Bond

Stamp was born on July 22, 1938, in the Stepney area of London’s East End. He was one of five children. According to the British Film Institute (BFI), Stamp’s interest in acting began after his mother took him to a local cinema to watch the 1939 film Beau Geste, though his father, a merchant navy stoker, had encouraged him to pursue something more practical.  

“When I asked for career guidance at school, they recommended bricklaying as a good, regular job, although someone did think I might make a good Woolworths manager,” Stamp told British newspaper the Independent in 2011.

After studying on scholarship at the Webber Douglas School of Dramatic Art, according to the BFI, Stamp would first tour in repertory theater. He appeared in a 1960 episode of the BBC series Spy-Catcher, according to his IMDb profile, but he first gained global prominence after portraying an 18th-century seaman in the film adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd in 1962. That drama directed by Peter Ustinov earned him an Academy Award nomination as well as a Golden Globe Award for “New Star Of The Year.”

Throughout the 1960s, Stamp worked with renowned British filmmakers like Ken Loach and John Schlesinger as well as Italians like Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Stamp earned fame not only for his work, but also for his high-profile romances during that decade, including with supermodel Jean Shrimpton and actor Julie Christie. 

At one point, Stamp was even considered to be the next James Bond after Sean Connery, though he said in a 2013 interview with the London Evening Standard that he scared the filmmakers behind the popular spy franchise with his ideas for how to make the role his own.

But just as Stamp felt he was entering his prime, work started to dry up. Stamp recalled to the Guardian in 2015 his agent telling him when he was only 31 or 32 that the movie studios were all “looking for a young Terence Stamp.” 

“When the 60s ended, I almost did too,” he said. In 1969, Stamp moved to an ashram in India. “I thought I’m not going to stay around here facing this day-in-day-out rejection and the phone not ringing,” he told the BFI in 2013, looking back on that period in his life. 

General Zod and The Adventures of Priscilla

Stamp was in India when he received a now-famous telegram addressed to “Clarence Stamp” that would lead to his most recognized role of his career. It was an invitation to meet with director Richard Donner to join the ensemble cast, including Christopher Reeve and Marlon Brando, of a blockbuster adaptation of DC comic Superman.

Stamp received widespread acclaim for his portrayal of the Kryptonian villain General Zod in the 1978 film and its 1980 sequel and said in 2013 that he “can’t go out on the street in London without somebody saying, ‘It’s Zod!’” 

Sarah Douglas, who played fellow villain Ursa in the films, remembered the late Stamp on Instagram as “beyond gorgeous and talented,” adding: “What a start to my career to have spent so many months in his company.”

Stamp told BFI that the “great blessing” of this next phase of his career was that he’d been “transmuted from a leading man to a character actor.”

Throughout the decades that followed, he was praised by critics for his performances, particularly in crime thrillers The Hit (1984) and The Limey (1999).

But he appeared in a multitude of genres, and many consider his star turn in the 1994 Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, to be a standout example of his creativity and dedication to his craft. Departing from his traditionally hardman roles, Stamp portrayed transgender woman Bernadette alongside co-stars Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce as drag queens. The endearing comedy became a cult classic, and Stamp earned his second BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for his performance.

“You were a true inspiration, both in & out of heels,” Pearce posted on X after Stamp’s passing. 

Stamp’s work would continue on in the 2000s and 2010s, with roles in films like The Adjustment Bureau, Valkyrie, Big Eyes, and the movie adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. 

Before Stamp’s passing, Priscilla director Stephan Elliott told the Guardian last year that Stamp was slated to return with Weaving and Pearce for a sequel, with a script already finished.

Elliott described Stamp to the Guardian as someone who had left a lasting impression on him since he first saw Stamp in 1965 thriller The Collector. “Terence’s greatest beauties were his eyes—in some of the early films you don’t see it, but in person, when they were shining, he could hold a room,” Elliott said. “He’d show up, use the eyes and turn everybody to jelly.”

Elliott also noted how Stamp became more discerning with his roles later in his career. “If he’d already seen something like it, he didn’t care. If something pressed his buttons and piqued his interest, he’d consider it,” Elliott said. Elliott remembered marveling at all the notable directors and actors Stamp got to work with throughout his career. “He said to me, ‘I just drifted from one to the other—if somebody had something interesting, I’d do it. That’s the way it’s always been.’”

• OpenAI’s Greg Brockman said it’s not too late to build a new AI startup.
• He said he sees value in startups that link AI to real-world applications.
• Brockman emphasized understanding domains like healthcare and spotting room for AI integration.

If you’re dreaming of joining the AI startup race, it might not be too late to start.

“Sometimes it might feel like all the ideas are taken, but the economy is so big,” Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s cofounder and president, said in an episode of the “Latent Space” podcast released on Saturday. “It is worthwhile and really important for people to really think about how do we get the most out of these amazing intelligences that we’ve created.”

Brockman said startups that connect large language models to real-world applications are extremely valuable.

Brockman, who cofounded OpenAI in 2015, added that domains like healthcare require founders to think about all the stakeholders and how they can insert AI models into the existing system.

“There is so much fruit that is not yet picked, so go ahead and ride the GPT river,” he said.

Brockman also advised founders against building “better wrappers.” “AI wrapper” is a dismissive term used to refer to simple applications that are built on top of existing AI models and can be easily offered by LLM companies themselves.

“It’s really about understanding a domain and building up expertise and relationships and all of those things,” Brockman said.

Brockman’s comments are part of a Silicon Valley debate about how new AI founders can future-proof their startup ideas.

Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company would “steamroll” any startup building “little things” on top of its model. He said that companies that underestimate the speed of AI model growth risk becoming part of the “OpenAI killed my startup meme.”

In a June podcast, Instagram cofounder and Anthropic’s chief product officer, Mike Krieger, offered some advice for startups that want to avoid being made obsolete by LLM companies.

Startups with deep knowledge in areas like law or biotechnology and those with good customer relationships can survive AI giants, Krieger said. He also suggested that startups play with new AI interfaces that feel “very weird” at first.

“I don’t envy them,” he added, about founders wanting to build in the AI space. “Maybe that’s part of the reason why I wanted to join a company rather than start one.”

• Russia has increasingly been trialing new types of ground drones as Ukraine’s robot war heats up.
• Designs include a “dronobus” for fiber optic drones, a chair on a buggy, and a box on wheels.
• Russian officials say they want to exponentially scale up ground combat drone production.

Ukraine’s drone industry has developed a wide array of new uncrewed ground vehicles, but Russian forces are innovating with their own designs, too.

While Moscow has been testing remote ground-based weapons since the early years of the war, a wider variety of rudimentary — and sometimes unusual — designs have been emerging this summer.

Take, for example, a remote-controlled four-wheel buggy that pro-Russian Telegram channels called an “assault” Termit drone from a battalion of the 58th Guards Combined Arms Army.

Instead of a weapons system, it’s fitted with a chair that can accommodate a single soldier. Its rear can stow weapons, food, and water containers, the popular Russian Telegram channel Military Informant wrote in a post on Wednesday.

Notably, this Termit drone variant leaves the soldier completely exposed.

Another unique type of Russian logistics ground drone was recently filmed by a Ukrainian first-person-view drone. A clip published on Sunday by Ukrainian drone crowdfunding activist Serhii Sternenko shows that the Russian design essentially featured an open box on wheels.

Sternenko wrote that the ground drone was destroyed and was transporting provisions near the front lines.

On Thursday, a Russian page dedicated to armor and artillery systems published schematics of a tracked, uncrewed multiple-launch rocket system that can fire 10 munitions at once.

The page, Bvtv.Info, wrote that the ground drone was being developed by a Moscow-based engineering firm.

The drone appears to resemble the TOS-1A, a Soviet multiple-launch rocket system mounted on a tank chassis and operated by a three-person crew. However, the TOS-1A features 30 barrels, triple that of the new drone.

Russian forces have also been experimenting with carrying explosives via remote-controlled hoverboards. One popular Russian military blogger, Two Majors, published several clips in April of a ground drone built with two hoverboard scooters.

“They can be used as kamikaze vehicles, as vehicles with a smoke screen, as self-propelled observation vehicles, and even for demining,” the Telegram channel wrote, asking followers to donate such scooters to the Russian military.

Another Russian Telegram channel, Victory Drones, published images in May of similar ground drones fitted with TM-62 anti-tank mines.

“The main advantages of such drones are stability provided by gyroscopes and low cost, which makes it possible to use them on a mass scale,” it wrote.

Then there’s the “Dronobus.” On August 8, the Russian state news agency TASS published photos of a ground-based uncrewed vehicle that acts as a roving mothership for fiber optic attack drones.

TASS wrote that Russian defense engineers are developing the Dronobus, which it reported can accommodate two fiber optic drones with 15-km cables.

Russian forces have been making new ground-based drones for years, such as a tracked platform with the Kornet anti-tank missile system that one unit said it tested in March 2023.

But the appearance of more varied designs comes as Moscow and Kyiv vie for any possible advantage with uncrewed ground vehicles.

In April, Russia’s defense minister Andrey Belousov said Russian firms and volunteer organizations had developed “several hundred ground robotic systems.”

“This year we plan to deliver an order of magnitude more,” Belousov said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been marshaling resources to develop its own new ground-based combat drones, using them to fire at enemy positions, evacuate the wounded, gather intelligence, or drop explosives.

Dubbed “iron soldiers” by Ukrainian officials, the use of such combat systems grows more critical as prolonged war strains Ukraine’s supply of fresh troops.

Ukraine says its soldiers are outnumbered three to one in favor of Russia.