The cinema icon made his film debut as an uncredited extra in 1950 and went on to become a gigantic star in the 1960s.
Being famous in the 1960s certainly had its perks. Caine hobnobbed with the biggest stars and enjoyed romances with starlets like Nancy Sinatra, Jill St John, and Natalie Wood.
A fan of music, he also enjoyed close friendships with John Lennon and Elton John and had a very strange connection to one of the biggest bands of the era: The Who.
Caine remebers his friend Terry Stamp: “Terry had a brother called Chris; he was just a young Cockney lad, and he didn’t want to be an actor or a painter,” he said. “And then one day he said, ‘I’m gonna be a rock ‘n’ roll manager,’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah yeah yeah – have you found a group?’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah, me and my mate found this group called The Who.’ It was typical of that time.”
Chris Stamp met future business partner Kit Lambert while working on a film set together. The pair first encountered The Who, then known as The High Numbers, when they played a gig in a London pub. Stamp and Lambert produced a short film about the band, which gained some serious traction and eventually became their managers. They oversaw the group’s rise to stardom and the release of albums like Tommy and Who’s Next.
Stamp remained closely associated with The Who, contributing to various documentaries about the band and various remastered editions of their albums, before his death in 2012 at the age of 70. (Farout)
