Articles/Interviews

A small orange sports car speeds up the curving driveway... a runaway horse bolts after it in hot pursuit, hooves thundering on the gravel... the gap is closing fast. Just in time, the little car swings into the safety of the mansion's outbuildings and the horse veers off towards the fields.

It could be a scene from a movie. In fact, it was my arrival with Simon Reed at his brother Oliver's magnificent estate in the rolling Surrey countryside near Dorking. The role of 'Squire Of Broome Hall', horse-breeder, and country gentleman suits Oliver Reed quite as well as any of the movie parts he has played. He makes sure that the horse - a frisky two-year-old with Shire blood - is unharmed and safely back in the hands of a groom before leading the way indoors. The vast floors are being polished and we pick our way carefully towards the dark panelled study where a blazing log fire crackles in the grate.

Oliver is enjoying a brief respite from his usual pell-mell film making activities. His daily routine includes walking the grounds (there are 50 acres!), taking the horses out, visiting the local pub and accompanying his five-year-old daughter Sarah to see Oliver! - "During the frightening bits, she started clutching me, failing to realise it was me up there as Bill Sykes who was frightening her!"

Oliver talks enthusiastically about his most recent movie with director Ken Russell - Pete Townsend and The Who's rock opera Tommy. Oliver plays Tommy's stepfather in it, and what with Russell's flamboyant direction, the music's own power, and a strong cast including Ann-Margret, Jack Nicholson, and Roger Daltrey in the title role, one wonders who is going to come out on top.

Oliver smiles: "I think Russell as a director makes a lot of noise with his camera, and The Who certainly make a lot of noise with their music. I look forward to the battle. For anyone to translate The Who's music in terms of images, it must be somebody like Russell - or a lunatic!"

We'll be seeing a new side of Oliver Reed in the movie, as an actor-singer, though he confesses: "I sing rather like a rugby forward, but I bluster my way through. There's a bit of acting in it, so what I lack in musical accomplishment I hope I can make up for by looking in the right direction at the right time - which is really basically what an actor is paid for. I'm very thankful that Russell is confident enough to let me sing."

"In Oliver! Carol Reed and John Woolf decided (probably quite rightly) that the one number Bill Sykes had, I shouldn't sing. But then Shani Wallis and Ron Moody make up for it, so that was okay."

I asked if 'Tommy' was his taste in music? "No, I'm very old-fashioned. I like Nat King Cole and 'The Blossoms Fell' and things like that. And some of the swinging Frank Sinatra records, and Rudy Vallee - and that record of Churchill's speeches," he adds blue eyes twinkling. "'Requiem To War', I'm really into records like that!"

Oliver did, however, buy the record of 'Tommy' when he knew he would be acting in the movie. "I played it upstairs in my son's discotheque with a lot of bright lights shining, and I must admit it sounds amazing. With this quadraphonic sound I think it should be very exciting. Pete Townsend is a very talented guy - rather like Lennon and McCartney - their numbers will last. Probably in years to come people will dig out of the ashes of the earth a buried copy of the soundtrack of the 'Tommy' and say it was very important."

Oliver talks warmly of working with Ann-Margret: "She's very, very professional and very, very sweet too - and I'm not just saying that because I can be rude about people - but she really is great. She seems rather frightened and shy in life, but the camera translates that shyness into something totally different. She's acting a hell of a lot in this."

One of the recent high spots for Oliver was his role as Bismarck in Richard Lester's movie, Royal Flash. Not because he was playing one of Germany's greatest statesmen, but because he got the chance to spar with Henry Cooper! "That's one of the main reasons I wanted to be in the movie," he confides. "I wanted to work with Lester again because I get on well with him and, like Russell, he leaves you to do your job. But the opportunity of sparring with Cooper seemed to me to be something like going to the pantomime and meeting Jack and The Beanstalk for real!"

Oliver's first movie with Lester, The Three Musketeers, is emerging on our screens as two films, though Oliver says he didn't know that movie had been split into two until he arrived for the Paris opening. "It seemed to me very strange that the first film just happened to end where it said 'Interval' in the script," he says with a wry grin. "I don't think that a director of Lester's skill and knowledge, and the producers like the Salkinds who have been in and out of all sorts of film studios most of their lives, would make the sort of mistake that Lester says - that they shot so much they could make two films out of it."

He is looking forward to The Four Musketeers, which is, he says, a little more serious than the first, more romantic and involved, going into Athos' relationship with Milady (Faye Dunaway). And while Oliver feels that his Grandier in Russell's The Devils is his best piece of acting, he thinks Athos is the closest to himself he has played: "I identify with his drinking habits, his playing habits, his suspicion of women - and he looks a bit like me as well."

I ask about the differences in working with Richard Lester and Ken Russell - Oliver made a film with each of them last year. "Lester's quieter," is the quick response. "He doesn't have emotional outbursts and tantrums like Russell."

Oliver's dream of retiring at 35 evaporated when he bought Broome Hall with its 47 bedrooms and 50 acres of grounds. Now he says he works primarily for money to keep it all going. He's working to a five-year plan, and the renovations and restoration will take another two years. Then there is the carpeting and furnishing to cope with. And when it's all finished? "I just don't know," he smiles. "I think I want to buy a pub then. I can't really see myself sitting in something that's complete!"

The Oliver Reed of today seems a far cry from the man submerged under mountains of make-up in those early Hammer horror movies, or the teddy-boy tough of his first films. "When I see my old films - including Oliver! - I cringe," he says, "and I think, 'how the hell could you play it that way'. But acting styles change and I'm not as intense as I used to be. Fifteen years ago it was quite fashionable to talk about 'reefers' and call people 'man', flick your fingers and look like an angry refugee from an angry Osborne play, or do your 'Billy Liar' bit. But what was flip and clever in those days is now really laughable. So if ever I'm in doubt that in ten years time someone is going to laugh at what I'm saying now, I don't say it."

This year, Oliver has plans to play Casanova in a movie, but before that he will be a Russian spy in Peter Collinson's The Sell Out, probably to be filmed in Israel. He also hopes to get his own film, The Offering, about the four knights who murdered Thomas Becket, into production. "Russell says he wants to direct it - he sees it as an English western - and I just hope he will have time amid all those composers he is doing!"

It is lunchtime and we adjourn to 'The Cricketers' Arms' for the customary pub lunch. There is a warm greeting from the locals for Oliver and his girlfriend Jackie Daryl who has now joined us. The atmosphere is relaxed and friendly - and I can quite see why Oliver may one day give up the crazy world of movies and buy a pub!