He was not short of female company either, accompanying girlfriend Jean Shrimpton to the 1965 Melbourne Cup, where he found the Australian paparazzi so intrusive he told his agent never to accept an acting job in that godforsaken place. (He later changed his mind, dragging up for The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, suiting up for a troubled Mars mission in Red Planet, and acting opposite a piece of paper in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.)

Stamp also had relationships with Julie Christie and Brigitte Bardot and, more recently, was married for six years to an Australian pharmacist 35 years his junior, after meeting her in Bondi.

After the buzzing '60s, Stamp had a long break from movies. Jobless after a couple of flops, he spent nine years at an Indian ashram, only returning to work when he was handed a dirty, dog-eared letter addressed to ''Clarence Stamp'' offering him a role in two Superman movies.

Now 74, Stamp is philosophical about these colourful ups and downs, even his divorce five years ago. ''She got bored with me quite quickly,'' he says without a hint of rancour or regret.

How does that leave him feeling about relationships? ''I'm learning untethered love,'' he says. ''It's not tethered to anything in particular, or anyone in particular.''

Stamp is on the phone from London, where he is staying with friends, to talk about his latest film, the drama Song for Marion. He told an English newspaper recently that he hasn't had a home for years; he stays with friends or moves from hotel to hotel. ''I always saw myself as a kind of strolling player, travelling about,'' he says.

In Song for Marion he plays a prickly retiree, Arthur, who has to learn to cope when ill-health strikes his wife, Marion (Vanessa Redgrave), whose greatest pleasure is singing in a choir led by cheerful Elizabeth (Gemma Arterton).

Stamp had one reservation about taking on what he thought was a beautiful script: Arthur was an ordinary, working-class man.

''I can do ordinary,'' he says. ''But I don't do ordinary very well.''

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) told him not to worry, saying he wrote the film about his grandfather, who was also good looking in his later years.

''It was very intuitive on his part, which gave me a great deal of confidence,'' Stamp says. ''As soon as I'd got over that, I thought, 'It's about my mum and dad'. My dad [Tom, a tugboat captain] was unusually good looking. He was better looking than any of us boys. He only ever wanted to be with my mother and she only ever wanted to be with him.

''So I thought to myself, 'Fair enough, if I get in difficulties, I'll play it as Tom'.''

Song for Marion joins The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Quartet and Performance as films about retirees dealing with such big issues as mortality, ageing, love and regret. Their box-office success indicates a growing audience for the triumph-over-ageing genre.

''These films were all in production at the same time,'' Stamp says. ''So it was obviously a universal movement.

''When we closed the Palm Springs Film Festival, I was sat in the front row so couldn't sneak out at the end, and hundreds of people came up to me and said, 'Please make more films for us'. I understand that, because I don't go to films very much because they're all for kids. I don't want to see films for kids. I'm not interested in Harry Potter and Star Wars and special effects. I'm not interested in virtual reality. I like my reality to be reality.''

Working for George Lucas on The Phantom Menace confirmed that view. ''It wasn't my kind of thing,'' Stamp says. ''I'd just arrived in Sydney one day when I got the call to do three days on Star Wars. I really didn't want to go but I went because I was going to be working with the wonderful actress who won the Oscar for Black Swan. I got on to the set and said, 'Where's the wonderful Natalie Portman?' And Lucas said, 'Oh, I've given her the day off. That's her. That bit of paper stuck on that post, that's Natalie.' I thought, 'I won't be doing many more of these'.''

One of the attractions of Song for Marion was working with Redgrave, whose distinguished career has included Isadora, Howard's End and an Oscar for Julia. Having performed with Redgrave on stage decades ago, Stamp wanted to work with her on film.

''In the year before the shoot she had lost her daughter, her sister and her brother,'' he says. ''When I walked on to the set that first day I realised that she was completely shattered. So my first thought was, just as a human being, I have to really be here for her.

''But like all great artists - we didn't really talk about it - I assume she put all that emotion into the character.''

Stamp seems none too troubled about his own ageing. ''My work has always been about my 'presence' - presence as in being present,'' he says. ''It was intuitive. It just kind of happened on my first movie that I was naturally more present between 'action' and 'cut' than I was in real life. Slowly, over the years, that sense of presence has seeped off into my day-to-day life. I've been learning to live with the energy of 'presence' really, so I don't think about the passing of time.

''Time is an idea inside that presence. Time is a thought. It's not actual. What's actual is a sense of awareness that one is born with and cannot get away from. It's always there.''

As well as three memoirs, Stamp has written a sequel of sorts to one of his best movies in recent decades, Steven Soderbergh's The Limey. Called Waterloo Sunset - a reference to the famous Kinks song that mentions Stamp and Christie in the line, ''Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station/Every Friday night'' - it's about a gangster who gets out of prison after 25 years and wants to win back his lover and get revenge on his best friend for betraying him.

Soderbergh urged him to write the film but now that the filmmaker is retiring, Stamp might direct it himself. Or he might not.

''I don't really have any psychological ambitions any more,'' he says. ''I don't create anything in my mind and pull anything to me. I'm just out there, waiting to see what happens.''

Song for Marion screens from April 25.