Terence Stamp, the acclaimed British actor perhaps best known to LGBTQ+ audiences for his role as a transgender woman in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, died Sunday at the age of 87.

The actor’s family confirmed his death, but did not specify a cause, The New York Times reported.

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Stamp, who grew up in London’s East End, made his screen debut playing the title role in the 1962 film adaptation of Moby Dick author Herman Melville’s homoerotic novella Billy Budd. That performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

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Known for his at times unsettling good looks and arresting blue eyes, Stamp went on to star as the mysterious, sexually omnivorous “Visitor” in legendary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) and as queer poet Arthur Rimbaud in the 1971 biopic A Season in Hell.

In 1978, he appeared in a cameo in director Richard Donner’s Superman playing the villainous General Zod opposite Marlon Brando. He returned to the role two years later, facing off against Christopher Reeve’s Man of Steel in 1980’s Superman II.

According to out director Stephen Elliott, Stamp was initially hesitant to take on the role of Bernadette, a trans woman who embarks on a road trip across the Australian outback with two fellow drag performers — played by Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce — in Priscilla.

“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?’” Elliott explained in a remembrance published by The Guardian on Sunday. “We talked long and hard about why he’d initially said no. It was fear. And fair enough – you have got to remember we were coming out of the HIV/AIDS mess. It was a taboo subject.”

“I looked at the work that he’d done all the way through, like the Italian years when he worked with Fellini and Pasolini, and thought: this was a man who took chances. And I think he was at absolutely the right moment in his life where he was ready for another chance,” Elliott added.

As Elliott noted, Stamp admitted that his reluctance came from a place of fear.

“A woman friend of mine just happened to be present when I was getting calls from my agent about the script, and she pointed out to me in a very incisive way that my fear was out of all proportion to the possible consequences,” the actor recalled in a 2013 interview with the British Film Institute.

Elliott recalled Stamp initially avoiding mirrors and declining to see footage of his performance while filming Priscilla.

“It wasn’t a fun thing, or anything I was looking forward to,” Stamp said in 2013. “It was, ‘F**k me, this is the last thing in the world I want to do: be in f**king Australia with paparazzi.’ It was like a nightmare. But it was only when I got there, and got through the fear, that it became one of the great experiences of my whole career. It was probably the most fun thing I’ve ever done.”

Stamp’s performance as Bernadette earned him a BAFTA and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor, and Priscilla has gone on to become a cult classic.

According to Elliott, in the decades that followed the film’s release, Stamp occasionally grew frustrated that people were still asking him about his role in Priscilla. But as recently as 2019, Stamp continued to reflect thoughtfully about what it was like to play a transgender woman.

“I was essentially different from Hugo and Guy; they were playing dressing up queens and I wasn’t. [My role] was more about what I felt emotionally,” he told Reuters at a 2019 screening of the film at the BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival. “I had to think about what it would be like to be born into the wrong body and born into a body that wasn’t the same as one’s emotions.”

Stamp also told the outlet that continuing to have LGBTQ+ fans tell him how much Priscilla meant to them brought “light into my life.”

“I can’t think of anything that’s more attractive than light,” he added.

Following news of Stamp’s passing, Priscilla co-star Pearce posted a tribute to the actor on X.

“You were a true inspiration, both in & out of heels,” Pearce wrote. “We’ll always have Kings Canyon, Kings road & F’ing ABBA.”