I first saw Terence in The Collector (1965) when I was a kid. It stuck in my head as the ultimate horror film – it terrified the daylights out of me. 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. He’d sit there and say, “Watch this, I’m going to stop a restaurant.” And he could do it. I saw him do it! It was extraordinary. He once told me that he used to have real fun on Superman when he was bored, stuck on top of the ice castle. “I’d just stare down until everyone went quiet,” he said.
We tried many actors when casting Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but absolutely everybody turned the role down. Terence was easily on the top of our list, but we thought he’d never do it. The honest truth is, he turned it down at first. But out of nowhere, his agent said to him, “Well, you’re bored. You’ve just done superhero movies. Why don’t you do something else?” It was astonishing when his agent reached out and said, “No, he wants to talk.” We were falling over ourselves. If he wanted the role, it was his.
