Articles/Interviews

"The parts one plays get progressively more interesting as one gets older" says OLIVER REED now nearing forty and notching up his fiftieth film

Oliver Reed was hoarse with shouting. "It's tough being a headmaster," he apologised to me as he slipped off his jacket and loosened his tie. "I've been roaring at the kids all morning and it's thirsty work."

The rumbustious Reed playing a headmaster - whatever next? For that's the role he portrays in his 50th film, The Class Of Miss MacMichael, as Terence Sutton, who presides with a rod of iron over a school for unruly youngsters in London's notoriously tough East End. And he's proving to be more than a match for these reluctant kids. I told him I didn't know what effect it had on the pupils he was yelling at, but it certainly scared me. As we walked down the two flights of stone steps leading to his dressing-room in the gaunt Victorian building which served as the principal location, it seemed only a few short years ago that Ollie would surely have been cast as one of the undisciplined charges rather than as the tyrannical headmaster.

However, times have changed. He's almost 40 now and, instead of black leather-jacketed tearaways, he is of an age where he can more convincingly portray politicians, generals, admirals, lawyers, policemen and - yes - even headmasters. In recent months, he has chosen to plump down firmly on the side of law and order for his screen diet. British moviegoers have yet to see him as a New York cop in Assault On Paradise and as a pacifist plainclothes detective lieutenant, Jim Wilson, on the brink of retiring from a corrupt American resort town in Tomorrow Never Comes.

During my visit to The Class Of Miss MacMichael, I peered over Canadian director Silvio Narizzano's shoulder to watch headmaster Reed in action. Clad in dark blue suit, he was pacing the large room where over 100 defiant children were seated cross-legged on the hard wooden floor. It was assembly time in the great hall where co-star Glenda Jackson, wearing a navy track-suit as nonconformist schoolteacher Conor MacMichael, was leading her pupils in a lusty piano accompaniment of "Onward Christian Soldiers" before Reed dismissed the class.

"This headmaster, Sutton, is such a hypocrite," he continued. "He's all things to all people. The audience will be wondering what he's going to do next. The kids are slightly wary of him. During rehearsals I was talking to a group of them, mostly recruited from London acting schools, and their interest in film-making is amazing.

"I was the product of a broken home. My parents were divorced and there was World War II, but when we moved into the country my childhood was pretty enjoyable."

"I went to about thirteen different schools," Ollie went on, "but I never encountered a headmaster like the one I play in this film. He wouldn't have been allowed to behave this way in real life. The authorities wouldn't have put up with him. He's a tyrant who shouts at the other teachers as well as the kids, then he's very smarmy to school authorities when he wants a grant or to raise money from them. The Army sergeant I played in Triple Echo, which I did with Glenda four years ago, was just a bully but Sutton in The Class Of Miss MacMichael is a hypocrite, egocentric and totally different. I don't like rehearsals. I came in cold and did my scene with Glenda. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see all the kids sitting there staring at me and wondering what I was going to do next. Glenda plays a teacher who cares, maybe a little too much, about her charges. She's constantly in conflict with Sutton. We have a lot of heavy dialogue scenes together - and that means a lot of shouting!"

"Glenda is one of the most talented actresses I've ever worked with. This is our third film together (the others were Women In Love and Triple Echo). Often, when you're acting a scene with her she doesn't seem to be doing too much, and you wonder whether she's pitching it right. Only when you see it on the screen do you find out she's acting you right out of the movie."

Reed's role in The Class Of Miss MacMichael means that he is frequently surrounded by large groups of tough Cockney schoolchildren of both sexes. "In Oliver! I kept my distance from the kids," he told me. "With Ron Moody, who played Fagin, they kept pulling his beard off and trying to take his pants down, but they kept their distance from me. I wanted Bill Sykes to be a frightening character, and I couldn't have retained that menace if I had allowed them to become too familiar through clowning around with me on the set."

I told Ollie that on my arrival at the school I had noticed a board with the following inscription in faded blue paint: "Headmaster, Terence Sutton, M.A. (Cantab.)"

He roared with laughter as he explained: "Sutton is the name of the character I play in this film. It's a joke in honour of Michael Winner, who's directed me in five films. He always describes himself in interviews as 'M.A. (Cantab.)', which sounds very scholarly. I'm going to have that board photographed and send it out as a Christmas card to everyone."

"Do people still come up to you and try to pick a fight?" I enquired, thinking of Reed's erstwhile reputation as a hellraiser.

"Oh yes," he replied. "They come up to me in pubs and say things like 'I bet you're not so tough'. So usually I go to my own pub where they know me and you don't get many strangers. The only other alternative is to frequent very expensive places where other people can't afford to go. I think perhaps the macho image created around me is the right one and it scares off a lot of people who might get violent. A lot of them don't recognise me now. I've lost a bit of weight, or maybe it's the glasses and short hair that fools them. Most people are used to seeing me with a sword in my hand after The Three Musketeers and The Prince And The Pauper, and anyway they don't expect to see me in a lounge suit."

"My aim is to bring romance and adventure back on the screen. I love costume pictures with lots of physical action and streetfighting like in those two pictures. I'm one of the few people who can get away with wearing period costume, as I always seem to look untidy in modern dress. "

"I'm forty next year and getting to the stage where I don't get to kiss all the girls," Ollie reflected tongue-in-cheek. "They almost regard me as senior citizen status now! At twenty, I used to get offers for romantic roles which meant kissing the girls. I thought in those days that roles like headmasters can wait until I'm forty. When I turned thirty, they had a different image of me. Now here I am actually playing a headmaster in The Class Of Miss MacMichael. The parts one plays get progressively more interesting as one gets older."

Happily for his many admirers, Reed's reputation as a born hellraiser hasn't been tarnished with the passing of the years and his activities still continue to make regular press headlines around the world. "I think I've been arrested in more countries than most people have had hot dinners - but it's mostly been for throwing cakes! I've even surprised myself sometimes. I've been barred from a few hotels in Hollywood and I've seen naked ladies jump out of cakes, like the time for Mark Lester's 18th birthday party during shooting of The Prince And The Pauper in Budapest. I feel very passionately about certain things and sometimes I do get carried away. My feud with Richard Harris is just a big joke. We've carried it on for eight or nine years, and the press love it. The same with Raquel Welch when we had a quarrel which was widely reported, then I sent her red roses and we kissed and made up. It's like being the Chessington Zoo parrot, everyone wants to be photographed with you. You get asked to pose as if you are the Eiffel Tower when you're in Paris. But all the publicity has been good for me. The public expects an actor to be different and to live a colourful life on screen and off."

During the past eighteen months, Oliver's acting assignments have included a half-breed Indian in The Great Scout And Cat house Thursday;.an American husband and father menaced by a strange house in Burnt Offerings; Miles Hendon, an English soldier-of-fortune in The Prince And The Pauper; an American police "hit" man in Assault On Paradise; and Eddie Mars, a London night-club owner in Michael Winner's The Big Sleep.

"In Canada, I've just finished Tomorrow Never Comes around Montreal," reveals Reed. "I play an American policeman in that film which also stars Susan George, Raymond Burr, John Ireland and Donald Pleasence. It was an Anglo-Canadian co-production, directed by Peter Collinson. Then I played a guest role in The Big Sleep because I wanted to work with Robert Mitchum. I was always one of the film buffs, and to me Bob is one of the very last of the Hollywood 'biggies'. I wanted to make a picture with him before he wanders off into the sunset."

"I've sung for Ken Russell in Tommy, and I've no unfulfilled ambitions left - although I would like to play Heathcliffe some day because I love romantic drama. After The Class Of Miss MacMichael I'm going to relax until Spring. I've made four films this year and I feel I've earned a rest. There are some projects that even my brother David, who is also my business manager, hasn't told me about. There's talk of a film about Pavlova and Nijinsky, and the possibility of a picture in Mexico about the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. But I never talk about a film until the contract is signed."

Before leaving the location, I noticed that the school motto was Semper prorsus ("Always Forward") which seems a most apt epithet for the thriving movie career of Oliver Reed!