Articles/Interviews

Oliver Reed has been classed as the sexiest English actor since Peter O'Toole. Patricia Johnson finds out just what his attitude towards women is

The ground moved, yellow and brown, alive with a plague of crickets. Candice Bergen, still striving to look chirrupy in the same scene she had repeated five times that day in temperatures hovering in the hundreds, was close to tears. A gaggle of cheeky children - blonde offspring of U.S. Air Force personnel stationed in Madrid -were being chivvied into line by their mothers, tight and florid in tight flowered pants and cotton sweaters drawn taut over ice-cream-cone bosoms. Not that the mothers were paying too much attention to their children, who were silly with boredom on the film set some twenty miles out of Madrid, waiting for their next scene as the pupils of a Wild West school-house. For the mothers all clutched autograph books - there must have been a sale in Madrid - all the books were white plastic with gold lettering, 'Auto-grafos'.

Candice Bergen, on the set of The Hunting Party, had come in for her share of signing. But it was Oliver Reed that the mothers were waiting for. American women living in Spain who had - six weeks ago - been completely unaware that there existed in the world an actor by the name of Oliver Reed. But at the air force base, some two weeks previously Women in Love had been shown.

"Oliver Reed," said one of the mothers, "is the sexiest English actor since Peter O'Toole."

To English eyes, perhaps Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed couldn't be more different. O'Toole, with the temperament and sensitivity of an Afghan hound; Reed, the blue-eyed bull-dog who brooks no nonsense. But they have both - in entirely different ways - captured the collective heart of American womanhood. Women in Love is currently breaking records in the States and it is Oliver Reed, as the rich mineowner Gerald Crich, who is dragging the ladies back for more.

It's all part of a quite deliberate move on the part of Oliver Reed.

"You could be the most brilliant actor in England, you could play up and down the country, in the West End even, and nobody except U.S. theatre lovers would know who the hell you are. You make a couple of pictures that capture public imagination, and you're there - for how long is another matter - but you're there at thirty-something instead of still waiting for the big break at fifty-something."

Oliver Reed is one of the new-brand romantic anti-heroes who has had the opportunities - and the determination - to cash in on it.

"Ten years ago, nobody thought of casting me as anything else but a villain."

His looks are fairly villainous - an impressive scar, powerful physique, an expression that remarkably resembles granite when anyone starts any sort of pretence, blue eyes that intimidate almost everybody into being straight, no-nonsense.

Reed, of course, started his career in horror films. He has also been an off-beat pin-up of the English cinema for the past couple of years. But all through the Dracula sagas and the bad British movies, it was the big-time of the U.S. box office that he was aiming for.

"I don't like talking very much about my Hammer career," Reed admits now, "but it's not because I'm ashamed of it, or wish I hadn't done it. Certainly I've played in vehicles which might have been a little slow, but everything, at its time, was useful. I mean, you can't hate a film that you had to make because you were very poor and were too proud to go on the dole. But all the time, people want to talk about the Hammer films, the same as now everyone wants to ask me about the nude scene in Women in Love. Look - if you believe in what you're doing, taking your trousers off is all part of it. And when five hundred people ask you the same question, and you have to give five hundred versions of the same answer - well, it just gets to be very boring."

Oliver Reed would be the last person in the world to call a spade a digging utensil. He delights in straight talking. His brief run-down of the plot of the film he will make when he finishes The Hunting Party would be unprintable if published verbatim. He said he took the part in The Hunting Party for two reasons.

"I've never played a cowboy before, it's the first Western I've been offered, and it's a good script."

The second reason is "Because I like the idea of the outlaw mentality."

"In The Hunting Party the relationship between the woman and myself starts off as a very basic thing - a man wants something and he simply takes it. It's quite - well - brutal, I suppose. But later there is this fantastic tenderness between them both."

"Theirs is very much the attraction of opposites. She is cool and cultivated and ladylike. He's an outlaw. But deep down, she wants him too because her husband is no good with her. Then she feels guilty with herself and it makes her antagonistic towards him. But afterwards she forgives herself - and him, too - and that's where the tenderness begins. The scene where they find they are really in love takes place in water and green grass and vines, it becomes like a haven, a heaven, a Garden of Eden."

He waxes lyrically enough about love in a screenplay, but in real life, Oliver Reed's views are perhaps a little more astringent.

"I adore women," he said, "I don't understand them, I make no pretence of understanding them, but then I don't expect to - that's the constant majesty of women, being unpredictable and thinking differently from a man. Directly a woman becomes understandable, predictable, then she's deep in trouble. All these women going on about women's liberation - trying to shed the feminine mystique - well, all I can say is God help them."

"Physically, a man can take a woman by force because he is, actually, stronger. But that's not exciting to most men. In actual fact trying to understand a woman is far more exciting."

"Women sometimes ask too much of men," he said, "I don't mean in monetary terms, but they want to possess, they want the man to belong wholly to them. And basically man is still a herd animal. It needn't necessarily mean that his love for a woman is gone if he sometimes wants to separate from her - go off by himself for a while, go with friends, perhaps even take another mate. But a woman can never understand this, and that's when the hurt and the painful words come in."

Oliver Reed was not exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth - "I came from a middle-class family and I had a middle-class education" - but his father is a writer and his grandfather was an actor. His uncle is the film director, Sir Carol Reed.

Still, in the earlier stages of life, it would have been a fair judgment to predict that Oliver Reed would never be more than a drifter. He changed schools thirteen times, ran away from home at seventeen and became a bouncer at a Soho strip club, then became a hospital orderly, a fairground boxer ("I won the first fight, lost the next, and decided I didn't like getting hit") and a mini-cab driver. Then the National Service claimed him and he spent close on two years in Malaya and Hong Kong.

"When I got back to London it seemed a reasonable step to try and become an actor," he said. But, without experience, without any drama school training, it was a long haul dragging photos around to agents' offices and getting the old don't - call - us - we'll - call - you routine so often that in the end it almost stopped hurting."

"The fact that I was older by that time was a good thing," said Reed. "From the age of eighteen the magic and the mystique goes very quickly from everything, so the thing that kept me going was not the so-called glamour that might have concerned me when I was eighteen. I kept on at it simply because I was determined to be an actor - and to do it without any favours from anybody."

And, after the first year of slogging and starving, the breaks started to trickle in. The first was a part in a children's television serial, then a number of small roles in forgettable British films. After that came the horror films with Hammer - a career which might have continued for Oliver Reed until he was as old as Boris Karloff. But he attracted the attention of English producer - director Michael Winner who starred him in a small-budget film where he played a beach photographer in a tatty seaside town. The film turned out to be a comparative success and gave Reed the showcase he needed.

It was TV director Ken Russell, though, who changed the course of Oliver Reed's life when he chose him to play the part of Debussy in one of his television biographies. "This," said Reed, "was my intellectual breakthrough."

Parts followed thick and fast and now Oliver Reed is in the position, he says, where he never ever gets to see a lot of good scripts because the producers can't afford him.

He has, though, this desire to get out from under which seems to be common to a surprising number of actors these days.

"I plan to retire from acting when I'm about thirty-five," he said - which gives him another three years. I love farming, and I would like to direct, and I'll do this just as soon as I have financial independence."

He also said that he would probably not remain in England if the tax situation became any more prohibitive. "I never want to get to the stage where the films I do would be dictated by my bank manager. Ireland has a much better tax system and one can live without having to worry too much, I might become an Irish citizen."

If those plans ever eventuate, said Reed, he would live on his farm and direct when the spirit moved him. "I would only do the things I really wanted to - and it would also get me the money to buy a few more bullocks."

But it will be a hard decision if he turns into a top box office star in the U.S. And this it seems, is what is happening right now...