Articles/Interviews

"WHEN HE first came here he arrived by helicopter on the front lawn and he had his chauffeur drive along beneath on the road, so the car was going down the road and he was hovering above the car in the helicopter shouting 'Faster, faster'. He arrived almost through my bathroom window."

"I'd just been playing soldiers in the wood when he arrived there and then he suggested halfway through dinner that we should play a game."

"I was supposed to run round the fields while he chased after me with the car to see if he could hit me."

There is a real sense of wonder and delight coming from this portly, bespectacled country gentleman, sitting in his typical country estate library, as he admits that he has finally found his match in madness.

Oliver Reed has met Keith Moon which is something for which many people, especially hotel managers and innocent diners in restaurants across Britain, will not thank Ken Russell.

"The way 'Tommy' came about is extraordinary because I can't sing, and Ken Russell said 'Do you want to make the movie?' and I'd just come back from Iran, and I said 'Yeah' and he said 'Come and have lunch and we'll talk about it'. And we had too much garlic."

"Then we went down to the Who's studio in Battersea and Ken said 'Get out there and sing'. I didn't know any of the songs, but so I said I'd go out there and sing 'Wild Colonial Boy'. But Ken said 'No, I want you to sing one of the songs.'"

"I don't know the music, I don't know anything, so there I was and poor Pete Townsend was drinking brandy out of half tumblers and eating chips all the time, and Ken was eating nuts - so that was the whole thing. The next day I came in with some currants an we just spent the whole time eating."

It would be easy to cat Oliver in the role of Falstaff - he tells his marvellous funny stories - but there is something almost sad and resigned behind it all. He originally wanted to retire at 35, but is still working at 36 because of things like alimony and renovating his huge mansion. And while he is far from reticent about discussing his film work he is much more excited when telling about health spas he been to and his personal philosophies.

"I think one should get old graciously. I remember a girl who was supposed to dance naked in 'The Devils' and coins were knocked on to the ground, and this little actress picks then up and says 'Look at that face!', I thought she was going to be rude - it was one of the Louis' I think - and she said 'Look at that beautiful face, all fat an bloated from loving life.'"

"Let me have fat men around me, that's what Caesar said, and I don't think he was far wrong. I'm looking forward actually to getting old and playing the sage. I want to be wheeled around in a wheelchair carrying a whip, pushed around by a Negro in a white uniform, whipping people if they get in my way."

He seems obsessed with his physical state. "I thought there would be a lot of strange remarks passed at me after the scenes in 'Women In Love' where Alan Bates and I wrestle naked. In actual fact the only women who seemed to be interested, which really shows a great deal about my anatomy, were rather old spotty waitresses at fish restaurants who used to say 'Oh, you naughty boy!'. Once I was walking down the Kings Road past a shoe shop and a fellow went (kiss sound) - that was the only comment."

"Fat spotty waitresses and one fag outside a shoe shop. I'm still not convinced he wasn't whistling at the shoes. You should see my fan mail. Half of them are saying 'alright, lets go to bed' and the other half are very young, saying 'can I have your autograph?'. I don't really have the hippie image."

"The kids, whatever they call themselves, don't want me to go around with bells on, grow my hair and eat blackberries. I think they know that now the association will be quite mature. You know I'll be drinking wine and eating quite good food in somewhere that's quite smart. I think before, when I was twenty, it was quite different."

"Now girls come to me and say 'My mum wants your autograph' so I know I've arrived. I say 'What about you? And they say 'Weeeelllll, alright then. I don't know what my mum sees in you.'. And girls usually write to me and say 'I'm not a youngster. I'm twenty six and I've got a child so I know what it's all about,' not imagining that I'd want to have an association with anyone younger than that."

Oliver lives with a quiet, charming woman who used to dance with the Royal Ballet. They have been together off and on for years, and have a beautiful five-year-old daughter.

"She (the daughter) is just learning about the difference between men and women. I tried to explain about children and now she thinks that's absolutely fascinating; she comes to bed with me occasionally and you can feel he foot very slowly going across - straight on the wang, pretending it's not there. You can tell by her look that she knows it's there and so directly you get aware - I mean a father can get sexually excited by his child, you know, if it's a girl. So you begin to get a hard on and turn over".

"And then you think 'what the fuck, it's a five-year-old girl, my daughter as well,' and then you begin to feel guilty about it so you get up and have a shower."

As we look at each other and laugh there is something so intense about those blue eyes ant I have to look down; it's something very trusting and kind and almost unbelievably, innocent.

He must have felt himself unshockable until he was first introduced to the world of rock via the Who and "Tommy". Jaded rock reporters can shrug off tales of Keith Moon throwing a television set out of a hotel window because he can't get a bottle of brandy from the porter, or Pete Townsend trying to drive his yacht up on to the beach because the skipper doesn't know how to run it, or even Keith showing blue movies of himself. But to Oliver this is all as new as it is to the eight-year-old who's just been to here first Osmond concert.

He's never even really listened to anything more modern than Nat King Cole records when he was in the army. To his generation music was an excuse to dance with a girl, to put your arms around her.

Now "Everybody's doing their own thing, which doesn't seem to be connected with sex or with any of the old tribal rites which seemed to me to be important in listening to music."

"In the old days, girls used to think about going to bed with somebody, having fish and chips, and then getting married and having lots of children while the husband goes off to the pub and she sits at home dusting. I think that women now are either frightened of me or hostile because they're frightened, but the more educated ones, the liberationists for instance, try to do their own thing which is start talking about chauvanistic remarks... things like that."

"But really they're just as frail and frightened and beautiful; as the rest of them, underneath their battledress. I think most of the women who are hostile are very young, and they're intelligent, but they haven't any experience of life and therefore it's just based on their intellectualism rather than the experience of travelling through life."

"Girls come back and tell me they've realised what a marvellous thing it is to be a mother or a lover or a wife, to be soft, to be looked after... not necessarily to be a smart chick of twenty-two who thinks she knows it all because she doesn't believe in being pinned."

It is quite a calm interview. We wander over to the pub after two hours of questions and answers, still chatting away. Oliver Reed is quite sober. He is gentle. He is witty and warm, and he really wants to be liked.

I do like him. Very much.