Articles/Interviews

The sun is flooding blindingly through the library windows of stately Broome Hall so that one's first impression of its master - film star Oliver Reed - is of a massive silhouette.

He emerges from the glare to reveal a powerfully broad, shouldered, bull-necked, barrel-chested figure bursting out of a white T-shirt and patched, faded Levis. The crooked smile does little to offset the aura of physical menace which he has exploited so successfully in his films.

He looks somewhat out of place amid the oak-panelled elegance of his magnificent forty-seven-bedroom home perched on a Surrey hillside near Dorking surrounded by, a sixty-acre estate and overlooking rolling countryside which stretches unscarred to the horizon.

But as he leads one on a guided tour of the grounds with a wide-brimmed safari-style hat pulled over his eyes and a shotgun under his arm it becomes obvious that he enjoys his real-life role as a rather rumbustuous country squire.

His only regret is that his work takes him away for long periods and he is lucky if he gets to spend more than a few weeks each year at Broome Hall. He dreams of the time when he will be able to retire and devote his time to the horses - giant Shires and racehorses - which he breeds there.

"I said some time ago that I'd quit when I'd was thirty-five," he says. "Well, I'm thirty-five this year but I have had to revise my plans since buying this place."

"By the time I've finished converting and restoring it I reckon it will have cost me the best part of �250,000 and that's only the start. I need a staff of ten to run the house, the stables and the grounds and their salaries alone cost several hundred pounds a week. So I've got to keep, working to pay for it."

"I'm caught in my own trap. It seems pointless having a beautiful house with fantastic gardens and horses and everything else I've always dreamed of if I am away working all the time and can only see it for something like a fortnight every six months. And yet if I don't go away and work I can't afford to have it anyway."

Despite his expensive life-style Olly is not exactly struggling to make ends meet. Since films like Women in Love and The Devils, turned him into an international superstar he has become established as one of the world's most sought after and highest-paid screen actors.

He can command over �100,000 a picture and even at that price producers are queueing up to secure the services of a man who is one of only a handful of "bankable" stars - names who will guarantee a film commercial success.

Olly has completed two films already this year and is now working on a third - an all-star version of The Three Musketeers with Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, Michael York, Faye Dunaway and Richard Chamberlain.

He maintains, however, that he is bored with acting and would happily give it up tomorrow.

"The ironic thing is that the more bored and unenthusiastic I become the more successful I am."

He smiles wickedly. "I used to be enthusiastic once but that was in the days when I used to make love to my leading ladies. I'm older now and I don't do that kind of thing any more."

"I used to whistle into my shaving mirror in the morning and really look forward to going to work. Now I think "Oh God, I've got to go into the studio again."

"Actors are like motor cars in that they will only fun as long as their petrol - their enthusiasm - lasts. My petrol is beginning to run out, which is why I'm thinking of gradually phasing out of acting."

"What I would like to do eventually is go into production. I have plans to produce children's films which I would like to make in the gardens here at Broome Hall."

"Ever since I went into the business my targets have always been purely financial," he says. "At first was worried about being able to pay the rent and the gas bill and then I fell in love with a girl and I wanted to make enough to take her out in style and then I wanted to make �20,000-a-year and now I've got to make enough to keep my house going."

"I regard acting as a very good way of making a lot of money. I have never had any desire to be another Laurence Olivier. There was a time when I had a thing about playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights but then I decided that I couldn't do it any better than it had been done already so, gave that up."

"As I say, I regard myself as a professional and being a professional has little to do with Art. The producer can be sure that I will sell some tickets around the world, that I will arrive on the set on time, that will know my lines and that I will look moody when I'm supposed to look moody."

It may be that he really believes in this rather jaundiced view of himself and his talent but on the other hand it is impossible to be with him for any length of time without being aware that he takes great delight in bolstering his image as an unsophisticated - almost brutish bruiser-cum-boozer.

This is sparked partly by a genuine dislike of show-biz pretensions - his mocking performance at this year's Society of Film and Television Awards presentation ceremony was his way of showing his disgust at the over-emotionally narcissistic "Darling" set - and partly by a conviction that his rough-and-ready image has contributed largely to his success.

"My public relations people have been working overtime to establish me in the eyes of the public as a punchy, boozy ram," he says.

He admits, however, that by no means all of his lurid escapades can be written off as figments of the publicists' imagination.

He did do a striptease in the public bar of his local - although he claims that the mates from Rosslyn Park rugby club whom he was with at the time put him up to it - he did drop his trousers at a press conference in Rome in order to show exactly what he thought of Burt Reynolds and he did tell the newspapers that he was going to set a new world record for sexual conquests and get his local publican to keep the score.

The latter was a typical bit of silly-season nonsense. "The papers had got this story from Yugoslavia or somewhere about a baker who claimed to have made love to four hundred girls. They started wondering how to give the story a new angle and someone obviously got the idea of ring me up and asking me if I wasn't going to do anything about it. They know I'll always be good for an outrageous quote."

"I said sure, I was going to do even better but I never had any intention of doing anything about it. It was just a joke."

He does also have a habit of getting into fights. "I don't know why that is," he says innocently. "It's not that I like fighting - I hate it. I don't like getting hurt and although I may look pretty tough I'm enthusiastic rather than professional and I do occasionally get the worst of it."

It was a particularly unpleasant "roly-poly" - as he calls his punchups - that left him with a wicked set of scars down one side of his face after the opposition had given themselves an unfair advantage in the shape of broken bottles.

For a time he thought the scars might have put an end to his career as a film star but with the fashion for lived-in rather than pretty faces they become an advantage.

Olly - son of a racing journalist and nephew of director, Sir Carol Reed didn't start his acting career until after he'd completed national service.

Before that he had led a fairly chequered school career attending a total of thirteen establishments most of which he claims to have left voluntarily.

He never shone academically but excelled on the sports field. He says he has always been a very physical person and even now he rarely reads because he finds he gets restless.

He went through a series of distinctly unglamorous jobs including bouncer, clerk in a seed factory and hospital porter before deciding to try his hand at acting.

He ignored his uncle's advice to start off in repertory theatre and instead scraped a living working as a film extra.

Eventually he started getting bigger parts - most of them in television and then there followed a whole series of horror films.

He pinpoints three major breakthroughs in his career. The first was The Jokers in which he starred with Michael Crawford and which made his name in America. "It cashed in on the swinging London scene and for that reason went down very well in the States," he says.

The second was when Ken Russell picked him to play the part of Debussy in his highly praised television documentary.

"For the first time people realised that I was capable of playing something other than a pirate or a were-wolf."

The third was the relaxation of the censorship laws in Italy which allowed controversial films like Women in Love and The Devils to be shown there.

"I took Italy by storm," he says. "In Women In Love I appear in the full-frontal nude and in The Devils I am involved in a lot of rather kinky situations with nuns. The Italians - having never seen anything like it in their lives - immediately turned me into a cult hero. As Italy is the world's second most important film market this meant that I was suddenly a very hot box office property."

He says he didn't really have any reservations about sharing with Alan Bates the honour of becoming the legitimate cinema's full-frontal male nude. "It will be something to tell my grandchildren that I was once seen stark naked by millions of women all over the world."

"The public were actually much more mature about it than I expected. When the film opened I was prepared to run the gauntlet of insults and mickey-taking wherever I went. In fact, the only embarrassment I suffered was when an old fruit wolf-whistled me in the King's Road."

He says there are very few things he would refuse to do on the screen. "I wouldn't kiss geezers. I know I cuddled Brian Deacon in Triple Echo but that was different because he was disguised as a woman."

As he says this he again smiles the wicked smile which inevitably accompanies his more outrageous or arrogant statement.

It vanishes when one asks whether the real Oliver, Reed would care to step out from behind the larger-than-life cardboard cut-out manufactured by the publicity men.

"No, there isn't any way that I would allow anybody to discover the real me," he says. "There is, a part of my life which is public but there is a line beyond which I will not let anybody tread except those people whom I know and love, and respect and there are only a handful of them. I think I would be losing responsibility if I allowed that part of my life to be read about by every one."

In fact even those people closest to him -his brothers David ("Brains") who manages him and Simon ("Wonder-youth") who handles his PR and the beautiful South African-born, ex-dancer Jackie Daryl with whom he has lived on and off since his marriage to Irish model Katie Byrne broke up - admit that they sometimes feel they don't know him.

Jackie - the mother of three-year-old daughter Sarah whom he regards along with his twelve-year-old-son Mark by his first marriage as the most important thing in his life - says that he is almost impossible to keep up with.

"He's mercurial and totally, unpredictable," she says. "But I believe that he is one of the men of the era. People who know him only through his films and the stories in the newspapers don't know him at all."

Olly himself is not sure exactly what he is. "I'm a mixture, I suppose, of the culture bug, the farmer and the stroppy boozer. I used to have all the answers once but now I have only questions."

"I spend my life parading around the screens of the world falsifying my identity and masquerading as a sex maniac, a priest, a burglar or a soldier and I suppose that if you are as good at your job as I am - you see, I love being arrogant - you are bound to get lost in your identities."

"The best way to sum it up is to say that I would like my epitaph to be: 'Here lies a man who loved life'."