No matter the role, Terence Stamp cut an irresistible figure, magnetic to watch. He was the doomed and guileless title character in the seafaring tale “Billy Budd,” the megalomaniacal General Zod in the early “Superman” films and the world-weary transgender character Bernadette in the poignant road comedy “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

In his 20s, when he sought a life beyond the straitened circumstances of his upbringing, he became a favorite of the London tabloids that relentlessly chronicled his relationships with the model Jean Shrimpton and the actress Julie Christie. His romantic life was at one point so well known that he and Ms. Christie inspired the “Terry and Julie” in the Kinks song “Waterloo Sunset,” released at the height of the mid-1960s music and fashion scene known as Swinging London.

Mr. Stamp, who died on Sunday at 87, was especially memorable as the mysterious Visitor in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s surrealist psychodrama “Teorema,” a demigod who “visits an upper-class Italian family and then has relations with the mother, father, son, daughter and the family maid,” as The New York Times delicately described the film’s plot in a 1969 dispatch.

Few directors have been more sharply attuned to the suffocating strictures of class than Pasolini and, in casting Mr. Stamp, he chose an actor whose lasting imprint on late-20th century would, it turned out, owe as much to his looks as his shape-shifting ability.

He was born working-class in the East End of London, the son of a tugboat stoker and a mother who looked after him and his siblings. When he said he had an interest in pursuing a life in acting, his father told him, “Son, people like us don’t do things like that,” according to an interview he gave The Hollywood Reporter.

As it happened, the times were on his side. Among the myriad cultural changes brought on by the 1960s was a migration away from traditional forms of masculine cinematic beauty, which favored men of genteel appearance. The generation of British screen stars preceding his tended to favor patrician-looking types like Laurence Olivier, whose family was established among England’s clerical elite, or Michael Redgrave, who attended Magdalene College at Cambridge.

Mr. Stamp was different. Not ruggedly handsome like Richard Burton, the Welsh coal miner’s son, or suave and saturnine like his fellow East Ender (and, for a time, roommate) Michael Caine, he was, rather, borderline pretty: a type for whom both women and men made fools of themselves.

“It started off in England and made its way here,” said Craigh Barboza, a professor of film journalism at New York University. “There was this cultural shift. With it came the rise of these nontraditional good-looking actors and actresses — though I think mostly actors — who could suddenly fit into leading man roles.”

Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Oliver Reed were others in a cohort more likely to be cast as randy gamekeepers than lords of the manor. And their looks were consistent with those of the rock stars and bad boys populating “Box of Pin-Ups, 1965,” a compendium of portraits by the photographer David Bailey that stands as a definitive record of a groundbreaking era. Mr. Stamp embodied “the tough, sexy look of somebody who was really attractive in a way that broke down class barriers,” said Vince Aletti, a critic and essayist who writes about photography for The New Yorker.

A favorite of fashion magazines, Mr. Stamp was less notable for his attire — not for him the Nehru jackets and rudraksha beads of the Beatles or the Tommy Nutter suits favored by the Rolling Stones — than as the sexy and slightly louche armpiece for women like Monica Vitti, Brigitte Bardot, Ms. Christie and Ms. Shrimpton.

The Vogue editor Diana Vreeland was instrumental in making Mr. Stamp an emblem of his era, Mr. Aletti added. A canny editorial tracker of what she deemed a cultural “youthquake,” Ms. Vreeland ”was all about anything that was young, young, young.”

So much of what we now think of as 1960s energy had its roots in the underground, added Mr. Barboza of N.Y.U., and equally in the so-called lower classes. With his smoldering looks, and no particular effort, Terence Stamp helped relax the rigid parameters of what constituted male beauty onscreen. He and others in his crowd, said Mr. Barboza, “changed the face of movies — literally,” ushering in an era of irresistible cinematic bad boys.

“Terence Stamp looked like pure trouble,” Ann Magnuson, the actress and performance artist, said by phone on Monday. “He was mad, bad and dangerous to know. But you wanted him.”