Terence Stamp opens up about platonic friendship with Princess Diana in new book

But now at the age of 79 it seems Terence Stamp is an altogether mellower person than the passionate firebrand and lover of some of the world’s most beautiful women – as well as a close friend of Princess Diana.

“The fact is I am past my best,” he admitted this weekend. “I’ve still got wonderful relationships with women but I’m not looking to get ******* four times a week. My feeling about sex is that I’ve finally been tossed from the saddle of a horse that I’ve been clinging on to for the past 60 years. So it’s kind of a relief really.

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“I guess that the only thing that changes with age is that you have a shift in understanding. Because of your own values you understand what young women are. You let go of things.”

In fact he admits he’d rather practise yoga than have sex these days. In a career that has spanned six decades – his debut was in Peter Ustinov’s 1962 classic Billy Budd, for which he earned an Oscar nomination – Stamp has certainly come to “understand” women.

High-profile relationships included Julie Christie, whom he met while filming 1967’s Far From The Madding Crowd, as well as supermodel Jean Shrimpton.

During their time together they were described as “the most photographed couple in London”. In his new autobiography The Ocean Fell Into The Drop he describes meeting Brigitte Bardot.

Stamp was dressed in a pair of trousers he had “borrowed” from the set of Far From The Madding Crowd and they came complete with what he describes as “curious flaps down the front”.

He writes: “‘What is zith?’ she enquired, pointing to the flap of my drop-fall strides. Galvanised I grasped her outstretched fingers. I drew them theatrically towards the flap. ‘I have a little mouse in here,’ I said.”

More recently he was married for six years to Elizabeth O’Rourke, whom he met when she was working in a pharmacy in Australia. When they wed in 2002 she was 29 to his 64.

But perhaps less well-known is his friendship with the late Princess Diana.

“The relationship came about because my friend Oliver Hoare, the art dealer, knew her,” he says. “I said, ‘I’d love to have a proper chat with her, why don’t you ask her if she’s up for it?’ He asked and she said yes. We got on amazingly well.”

Stamp insists that despite his reputation he and Diana kept their friendship strictly platonic. “It wasn’t like that. I thought that was the last thing she needed really. She just wanted somebody to talk to that was a guy, who would give her objective opinions. And because of that we just kind of opened up to each other.

“I saw the sadness in her because…she was a believer in the marriage and all that. And it didn’t turn out the way she expected it to.”

Such was the level of their friendship Stamp would even cook dinner for the Princess – the first time she came over he remembers making mushroom risotto, decorating the meal with the letters HRH in truffle paste.

“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 says. “The time I spent with her was a good time.”

But truffle paste and intimate dinners with royalty was a far cry from Stamp’s upbringing. The eldest of five children he was born in Bow in London’s East End to a firmly working-class family.

“My mother took great pains to have us kept beautifully clean and dressed because she didn’t want people to know how poor we were,” he says. After leaving school he worked in advertising before winning a scholarship to drama college and soon fell in with a crowd of exciting, authentic young actors that epitomised the iconoclastic spirit of the age – even sharing a flat with Michael Caine.

Once Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole and others had broken through, that was what people wanted,” he says. “They didn’t mind if you had a real working-class accent or attitude. You didn’t have to pretend that you were middle-class any more.

“These days the fame is of first importance, whereas in the 1960s it was the craft that was of first importance.”

After his electrifying performance as the eponymous Billy Budd he found huge fame in a series of acclaimed films through the decade including The Collector (for which he won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival), Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, and Far From The Madding Crowd. But following the breakup of his famous relationship with Shrimpton, Stamp escaped the limelight at the end of 1960s, dropping out of Swinging London and travelling to India to study yoga and undergo a “spiritual awakening”.

It took until 1978 and his role as super villain General Zod in Superman, alongside Marlon Brando, before he once again hit the headlines for his acting abilities.

The influence of his times in the spiritual calm of India remains, however. Gone is the womanising hell-raiser of old: the Terence Stamp of today does not drink, is a strict vegetarian and still practises yoga every day.

“I am in good health. My body knows how long it has been here, though. It doesn’t matter how much yoga I do, the body has been here for a long time, it’s nearer 80 years than 70. It’s pride and vanity that enables me to stay with a body not dictating to the mind.

“I know a lot of actors just can’t. They get addicted to the sherbet [alcohol] and to the food in the same way. And I feel those things but I’ve always regarded my body as an Aston Martin.

“My only ambition is to die healthy like a lot of the fakirs and dervishes I met in the East. Death happens to everybody and it’s going to happen to me and it could happen any time.

“I’m very famous now in a way that has only been true over the past 10 years in the sense that I get recognised a lot on the street. The nice reason is that the British appreciate longevity. And the ordinary reason is a lot of my movies are on the box now.

“When people come up to me it’s no longer a drag. They want to say hello. Guys want to tell their mums they’ve met me because their mums love me.”