British actor Terence Stamp, a leading man of 1960s cinema before reinventing himself in a series of striking roles — including as Superman villain General Zod — has died aged 87, UK media cited his family announcing Sunday.

"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," media quoted the family saying.

Stamp, exploded on to the screen in the 1960s as a leading man, even then sometimes playing troubled characters. At one point, he seemed to specialise in playing brooding villains 

Later still, he broke out of that typecasting to play a partying transgender woman in "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert".

From Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Theorem" to a villain's role in one of the "Star Wars" films, the handsome leading man captivated audiences in both art house films and Hollywood blockbusters.

He lent his magnetic presence to more than 60 films during a career that spanned a range of genres.

Heroes and villains

The London actor from a working-class background, born on July 22, 1938, had his first breakthrough in in Peter Ustinov's "Billy Budd".

His performance as a dashing young sailor hanged for killing one of his crewmates, earned him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Best New Actor. 

Carving out a niche for his alluring depictions of broody villains, he won Best Actor at Cannes in 1965 for "The Collector", a twisted love story adapted by William Wyler from John Fowles's bestselling novel.

His 1967 encounter with Federico Fellini was transformative. The Italian director was searching for the "most decadent English actor" for his segment in an adaptation of "Spirits of the Dead", a collection of Edgar Allen Poe stories. 

Fellini cast him as "Toby Dammit", a drunken actor seduced by the devil in the guise of a little girl.

Another Italian great, Pasolini, who cast him in the cult classic "Theorem", saw him as a "boy of divine nature". In the 1969 film, Stamp played an enigmatic visitor who seduced an entire bourgeois Milanese family. 

'Kneel before Zod!'

He also had a relationship with Jean Shrimpton — a model and beauty of the sixties — before she left him towards the end of the decade.

"I was so closely identified with the 1960s that when that era ended, I was finished with it," he once told French daily Liberation.

But the dry spell did not last long. Stamp revived his career for some of his most popular roles, including in 1980's "Superman II", as Superman's arch-nemesis General Zod.

His famous line from that film, "Kneel before Zod!" was spreading online in social media tributes after the news broke of his death.

Other roles followed, including that of Bernadette, a transgender woman in "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" (1994), in which Stamp continued his exploration of human ambiguity, this time in fishnet stockings.

He continued to pursue a wide-ranging career, jumping between big-budget productions such a villain's role in "The Phantom Menace" one of the Star Wars films to independent films like Stephen Frears's "The Hit".