Although his hair is now a shock of white, rather than a shock of black, the man in the two-inch wide braces, cashmere socks and handmade shoes is unmistakable. Unlike his other film star contemporaries - Caine, Finney, Harris - at 6'2["] and 166 lbs, Terence Stamp has hardly changed. The piercing blue eyes that captivated Julie Christie - and the rest of the female population - as Sergeant Troy in Far From The Madding Crowd in 1967 are still as unflinching; his arm could still put a sabre through its paces, even though he's pushing 60. Stamp's film career spans 35 years (he was nominated for an Oscar for Billy Budd in 1962) and, as anyone who caught his daring central performance as the drag queen Bernadette in Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert knows, he's not done yet. His energy is phenomenal. (He swims a mile every two days, beginning with a length under water.) All the more extraordinary given he has eaten no wheat, no sugar and no dairy products for the last 30 years. Stomach ulcers had started when he was 24. ("It's like being attacked by a huge ginger cat clawing the inside of your stomach.") Three years later on the set of Federico Fellini's Spirits Of The Dead in Rome, his interpreter suggested it was not caused by stress, but diet. He went on an exclusion diet of brown rice for a month. The culprits turned out to be wheat, dairy products and sugar. For good measure he also cut out fish and meat.
"It was the late 1960s. If you had intolerances and if you were a vegetarian there was nothing. I'm not a cook but I cooked for myself. I had to." It was a long process ("When I first made bread without wheat it tasted as though I'd dug it up from the road.") He had no idea that it would eventually lead to a cookery book. "But I knew what worked and I knew how to make things tasty." Four years ago, in partnership with Elizabeth Buxton - a friend of 20 years whose daughter suffered from the same allergies - he launched a range of allergy-free snacks, branded The Stamp Collection, which has since won two British awards. "This entailed me owning up about my intolerance. So I was on this radio programme and the BBC switchboard was jammed. We were completely overwhelmed." Official figures for food allergies, says Stamp, vastly underestimate the reality. "It's all hushed up. They say it's 20 per cent but it's more like 70." What the callers wanted was recipes.
"I didn't really want to get involved but Elizabeth really wanted to. `But they'll need about 100 recipes,' I said. But when we added them up, between us we already had about 50." The other 50 they put together over a four-month period.
Stamp now lives in Long Island, and the US is four or five years behind on food allergies. "I know shops where you can get organic malt and semolina bread and goat's brie. I know stuff that would only appeal to four drag queens and Einstein. But we wanted it to be mainstream because the intolerances are mainstream. We didn't want it to be exclusive. So then we started scouring the supermarkets and we tailored the recipes for what is available."
One thing they could not find was a general purpose wheat-free flour. So, with the experience of the snack foods already under their belts they put their own flour into production and the Stamp Collection organic and wheat-free flour should be available soon in good supermarkets in the Ireland, "like Fields in Skibbereen," says Hibernophile Stamp.
Although famed as the archetypal cockney ("the Stamps were shoeless and seriously poor") Irish blood runs in both sides of Terence Stamp's family, though it wasn't until he arrived in Dublin to play the Long And The Short And The Tall in 1959 at the Gate Theatre that he realised quite how Irish he was. Opposite the stage door was a side door to "this amazing pub, Neery's" that seemed always to be open. ("It was love at first sight.")
"I was a star in London, but in there I was as common as mud. I could hardly believe it. They all looked like me. I felt wonderful. I felt sort of related. Ireland totally fitted in with my inner vision and during the 1960s I would go with Shrimpton for holidays."
Jean Shrimpton, the first of the new generation of natural models, was equally famous as Terence Stamp's girlfriend. And he was as famous for his women as for his own good looks. He still prides himself on his ability to turn young heads. Like the time "two young colleens" in Skibbereen tourist office mistook him for Jeremy Irons. "I said `There's two mistakes here. First of all, I'm not Mr Irons. Secondly Mr Irons is married. I'm not. I'm dangerous.' And they said, `What are you doing later?' They had no idea who I was. Just knew I was somebody." The blue eyes twinkle.
Self-denial does not appear to be part of Terence Stamp's make-up and in spite of the daunting list of forbidden ingredients, there's nothing hair-shirt about the recipes in The Stamp Collection Cookbook. Quite the contrary. This is food to be enjoyed by all, from the most gluttonous to the most refined - crucial if other family members are not to mutiny. And it's not just vegetarian. Fish, shellfish and poultry feature alongside muffins and chocolate cake.
It's now eight years since Terence Stamp stopped being a vegetarian himself. "I felt very well, but I was leading this peripapetic life. I was a bachelor and still doing the occasional striptease and it was like I was being told you need a bit of animal protein. The truth was, I was never a vegetarian for humanitarian reasons. And when I reintroduced fish, when I went down to do my cardio swim, I could swim further underwater. I was noticeably stronger."
He started with childhood foods of his East End background: "Herring, skate, rock salmon. It took a few months, then I got really sophisticated and had things I'd never had, like monkfish. It was a whole new world. But after 25 years it was really curious. The texture." He licks his lips. "Like eating someone." And he looks at me with those trademark eyes. Dangerous is not the word.
The Stamp Collection Cookbook, including over 100 wheat-free and dairy-free recipes, by Terence Stamp and Elizabeth Buxton (Ebury Press, £19.99)