Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps

that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds.

This is a download from the BBC. For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.co.uk slash radio three.

Some film stars take years to achieve their magnitude.

Sean Connery and Oliver Reed are dimly visible in the backgrounds of 1950s British B pictures.

Michael Cain played a private in a hill in Korea before he became an officer in Zulu.

The man who was once Kane's flatmate, though, is one of those stars with no apparent pre-history.

This Nightwave special belongs to Terran Stamp, a man who seemingly fell to earth 50 years ago

and into the title role of Billy Budd, Herman Melville's hero,

a being too good to thrive in a morally dirty world.

There he was with that weird blonde hair and those icy blue eyes,

clearly a creature not of this earth.

It was a good moment to arrive.

British cinema was looking for Terran Stamp or someone like him, a star to signal that the 50s were over, that screen heroes

could now be young enough not to have fought in the war. Stamp made his mark on that decade.

He chloroformed Samantha Eger in The Collector, wooed Julie Christy in

far from the madding crowd, went on a mission with Monica Viti in Modesty Blaze, was brilliantly

unreliable in Ken Loachie's poor cow and received a name check in a kink song. But he also

haunts the history of films in which he didn't appear. He turned

down Alfie. He was unceremoniously dumped by Michelangelo Antonioni from blow-up, an experience

that sent him off into a more distant orbit. By the end of the 60s, he was a European star,

...