August 27, 1994 | There was a point in the 1960s when Terence Stamp was an actor on almost every casting director's A-list, and a gossip-column staple as a rogue prince of Swinging England.

After establishing himself on the London stage, he made a smashing movie debut as the martyred protagonist in Peter Ustinov's film of Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1962). Then he earned critical raves and an Oscar nomination for his chilling portrayal of a repressed bank clerk turned kidnapper in William Wyler's The Collector (1965). After that, he stretched himself in such diverse roles as a comic-strip hero come to life in Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise, a swashbuckling rogue in John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd and a pansexually seductive intruder in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema.

And then Stamp walked away from it all.

It was not an impulsive decision. At first, there were merely vague stirrings of discontent. Then there was the emotional devastation after ending a long-term love affair with super-model Jean Shrimpton. All this and more weighed heavily on Stamp as he began to wonder why having it all didn't make him at all happy.

In a segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), an anthology film loosely based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Stamp was cast by director Federico Fellini as an international superstar who feels trapped in the spotlight. Call it a case of art imitating life, and you won't be far off the mark.

''I wasn't in a state of desirelessness,'' Stamp recalled in a recent telephone interview. ''I was just satisfying desire so quickly that I didn't notice that I wasn't at peace. So I thought I'd try something different.''

And that led to years of spiritual quests throughout Europe and India.

''Initially,'' Stamp said, ''it wasn't a voyage of self-discovery. It was just that I was trying to get away from all the things that were painful and familiar, that I'd had great expectations of. When I did get away, I realized that when I thought I was at the top of the mountain, I'd just been at the bottom of a much bigger mountain. And that's when I realized that all my problems were inside my own mind. That was my enemy -- that was what I had to address.''

With an audible sigh, Stamp continued: ''I didn't dream that I would end up exiled from the business. I didn't dream that people were going to forget about me when I left, which is what they did. And my recall wasn't until '77, with the Superman movies.''

Since his comeback stint as the villainous General Zod in Superman and Superman II, Stamp has excelled in an impressive variety of character roles: an informer whose time runs out in Stephen Frears' The Hit, a paternal rancher who gives Billy the Kid a temporary home in Christopher Cain's Young Guns, a businessman slightly less ruthless than Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone's Wall Street .

But nothing Stamp has done before or after his hiatus from cinema will prepare audiences for his grandly entertaining turn as Bernadette, a sad-eyed and sardonic transsexual, in his latest movie, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Written and directed by newcomer Stephan Elliott, the Australian-produced comedy-drama deals with three drag-queen performers -- Bernadette and two gay collaborators, Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) and Felicia (Guy Pearce) -- who leave Sydney and travel halfway across the continent to perform at a resort hotel. During their journey in a brightly painted bus nicknamed Priscilla, Bernadette finds true love, sort of, and disposes of an outback redneck in a most unladylike manner.

Elliott has joked about casting ''one of the most beautiful men in the world and transforming him into an attractive older woman.'' But for Stamp, the man-into-woman transformation wasn't quite so amusing. To psychologically prepare himself to play Bernadette, he interviewed several real-life transsexuals and studied every page of Conundrum, Jan Morris' autobiographical account of her own sex change.

''The thing that Jan Morris beautifully illustrates, and what I found was the case with most of the transsexuals that I met, was that, quite early on in their lives -- like, when they were 3 or 4 years old -- they have a very, very clear insight that they are girls. They know they're girls. They know their gender is feminine. And as they get older, the realization comes that they're somehow in the wrong body. And that's peculiar to the transsexual. Because  most of them, you know, are not homosexual... It's just that they're female. And there's been this, like, mistake.''

Only after dealing with the inner self did Stamp begin to worry about the outer aspects of the character.

''The false nails were by far the most painful thing,'' Stamp said. ''I mean, the fingertips are really, truly sensitive. And the nails are being pulled from their beds by these kind of implacable false nails. Believe me, you only knock a false nail once. You feel like you're in Dachau, having your nail being pulled out with pliers.

''The second most painful thing was the full body wax. And then, having nipple hairs extricated one at a time with tweezers, because they were impervious to waxing.''

After enduring those torments, Stamp said, the rigors of rehearsal for Bernadette's drag-queen performances -- dancing, vamping and lip-synching disco tunes, all at the same time -- were relatively painless.

At 55, Stamp looks back at his on-again, off-again, on-again career with a mixture of amusement and resignation. He remains extremely proud of his work with William Wyler in The Collector, and still chuckles when he remembers his youthful arrogance while dealing with the veteran filmmaker.

''You can imagine the kind of gall I had -- I was, like, 23 or something -- when I met Wyler. I said, 'I have to tell you something: I've heard you like to do 30 and 40 takes. I'd like you to know, I like to do one.' And Wyler said, 'You give me what I want in one, we'll get along just fine.' And it was fine. I just did one or two, and then he went round on (co-star Samantha Eggar).

''Wyler and I understood each other. And I understood what he wanted. Oliver Stone was the same. I had less problem with those two guys than maybe any other director. But those guys, they're suckers for actors. If you can deliver, if you can give them an emotional underlay that's apt, they've got it. Where the problem is, is where you've got a director like John Schlesinger, and you give him the business, and he wants something else. That's where you're in trouble. Because, generally, it's not that he wants something else, he wants somebody else. He wants a completely different actor.''

Any regrets? ''Oh, sure. I regret turning down George Cukor to play Romeo and Juliet opposite Audrey Hepburn. I regret turning down King Arthur for Josh Logan in Camelot. And I regret turning down Once Upon a Time in the West for Sergio Leone.''

But he most certainly doesn't regret turning down the lead role in Alfie, even though he portrayed the randy womanizer long before Michael Caine (his one-time roommate) got a crack at the role.

''I played it on Broadway,'' Stamp said, ''and I was bleeped on by Walter Kerr and the other New York critics ... So I played a month to, like, nobody. Which was very harrowing. And during that run, I was offered that film. And I thought, 'Oh, man! I don't want to do this again!' And so I took Modesty Blaise, with (director Joseph) Losey, which I thought was going to be more fun. And Mike was offered (Alfie), and took it straight away.

''And in fact, he was better than me…''