Articles/Interviews

Fond of Booze and bored with acting, Oliver Reed is taking on a new real-life role as a Guernsey fisherman. But the middle-aged hell-raiser and his young wife Josephine have a greater - and unfulfilled - longing...for a son of their own.

To stay the course with a champion hell-raiser like Oliver Reed must be the ultimate challenge for the dedicated drinker. The challenge was set. Meet in The Parrott, a hardy seafarer's pub in a harbour on Guernsey. There, standing at attention in mock salute, beard bristling, eyes blinking behind owlish glasses, was Mr Reed who, having snared his quarry, promptly disappeared back indoors in case the beer warmed. This is the man whose mischievous grin has been seen on TV advertising non-alcoholic wine-a little like Margaret Thatcher agreeing to promote the Labour party.

Fishing for a part

There's no faulting his generosity as a host, as our meeting developed into a 12 hour drinking session, during which he devoured wine, beer and brandy and various quantities of lime and soda - a drink he was introduced to by a teetotaller which he has customised by adding vodka.

This is Oliver Reed "at rest" on the holiday isle where he says, "the pace of life is different - you have to come down a peg". The roistering actor is taking on a new role as a Guernsey fisherman. Having bought a lobster boat, Reed - the star of such epics as Castaway and Women in Love - is ready to play the part of the old sea salt. "I can walk around in the winter in a yellow mackintosh and Wellington boots, smoke Gauloises and look professional. Every time we get a fish I shall roll it down my coat to cover it in scales.

"I like the image. To be perfectly honest I recognise in me the coward. If it's a very cold day and the wind's blowing and the sea looks very dangerous I'd rather snuggle up in bed, while the skipper goes out and earns a living for the boat and himself." The craft has been named the Olly Jo after himself and his wife Josephine.

Acting is like being an emotional prostitute...

He refers to his house as Worthing, because it's his "retirement cottage". He's bored with acting, "bored with making faces and saying things I don't mean and shouting at people early in the morning that I don't want to shout at and jumping around on top of ladies that I don't want to jump around on and who don't want to be jumped on anyway. Acting is like being an emotional prostitute.

"There's only so much one can give. It's like a racing car. It will only go fast for so long before it needs a new engine or the driver finds a new car. I'm not running away. I'm bored and I can afford to be-just. I don't do things I don't want to do. Now if I want some building done I'll go out and do a job to pay for that."

He likes the peace of the Channel Island, where the only blight on his landscape is a new luxury hotel being built. He won't live at the "posh end of the island", but has made his nest in an ordinary redbrick house built in a disused quarry, with its own duck pond and well-manicured garden. For Mr Reed is a keen gardener, with unorthodox methods. The roses happily bloom despite Olly regularly "tinkling" over them in full view of his guests. He has established his own notoriety with his bar-room brawls and arrests for drunkenness. He loves to ruffle the calm.

More pussy-cat than tiger

"The only time I get in trouble is through talking when I should be listening. I'll stand up for my own views. When people get mouthy in bars I just respond. But my bark is worse than my bite. That's why, unlike most fighters, I'm covered in scars. I'm not violent. I'm more like a pussy-cat than tiger."

Despite that, he was arrested in Guernsey and fined for being drunk and disorderly following an argument in which a pane of glass was broken. He had similar problems in an American ski resort which cost him a night in jail and a �600 fine. His former stand-in, Reg Prince, has also claimed that he was badly injured after falling from a restaurant balcony after a "playful" push from Olly when they were filming Castaway in the Seychelles. Mr Reed refuses to talk about it as it's "subjudice".

He has never been embarrassed by anything that's happened, "otherwise I would wear a suit and work in the city". He professes to be unshockable, but has delivered his own shocks-like the time on the Michael Aspel Show where he offended many viewers by his "drunken" antics and swearing. "Strangely enough," he says, "I was absolutely sober. Then I saw this orange juice coming up and I thought, I'll play a drunk'."

He feels a little aggrieved that he got the stick while comedian Billy Connolly could use more adult words on TV, without causing the same furor. "All right Billy was on later at night and I probably wouldn't have been nearly as entertaining, I must admit. But nobody really gives me the opportunity. People are usually terrified of meeting me."

His principle relaxation in life is going to the pub. "It always has been. It's been my drama class, my school, my psychiatrist, my doctor, everything."

Despite his awesome capacity for the booze he denies the principal attraction of the pub is the drinking. He doesn't after all have to go to a pub to drink.

His garage is well-stocked with cases of vodka, gin and beer, where we could sneak in, after the pubs had shut "without my wife or mother-in-law seeing us.

"If I were to drink as much as the press intimate I would be dead. If Josephine and I are by ourselves we don't - only if a guest comes round. Otherwise it might be a sign I had a drink problem. I'm a lot I quieter a person than the image I would have it."

Highs and Lows

He has "had enough" of the mad splurges of the past. "If you live here you do come down a gear - and I chose that gear." Reports that doctors warned him to stop drinking or he would kill himself are dismissed as "hearsay". He does as he pleases, although as time catches up with the 49-year-old actor he's aware that "it's more difficult to shake it off if you're rotten in the morning-so you don't get rotten".

"If I'm working I can't get drunk as I'd lose my timing. During my own time, when I'm in the company of people who wish to have a drink, then I'll have one with them. If they get drunk, the chances are I will too. But I don't go out to get drunk, I don't need that kind of high. If that was the case I would be in Acapulco smoking dope with the Mexicans, but I don't want that."

He went through his drugs phase in San Francisco in the Sixties, where he lived on "joints" and aspirin for about three-and-a-half months. "I even put flowers in my hair. It was absolutely wonderful. I used to live up in treehouses with monkeys and fellows playing saxophones. Unfortunately nearly all those people are dead, through the drugs. It was just a thing I wanted to see."

The taming of Oliver

His wilder ways were curbed by an awkward young teenage girl with a smart home counties accent called Josephine Burge whom he once said "has tamed me ... has put to rest once and for all the demon hell-raiser, Olly Reed."

Their romance stirred its own demon when it first became clear that a 16-year-old girl was sharing a Caribbean holiday with a boozy actor 26 years her senior. Even Olly's ex-wife, Irish model Kate Byrne, joined the general tone of condemnation by describing the relationship as madness. He has a son Mark - now 27 - from his first marriage. When that split up he spent 10 years with South African dancer Jackie Daryl and they have a 19-year-old daughter Sarah, who is just four years younger than his present wife.

But to Josephine he was the white knight - or more exactly- the grey knight who rescued her from schoolwork. It was the "air of innocence" of the man who came into the pub where she and her brothers would drink which first appealed to her.

"He had an aura around him, he was from a completely different world" ... the world of Harrods and high-living. For a while, she tried to continue her A-level studies and joined a correspondence course. But left swotting in her hotel room, she would hear Olly and his friends larking about. "He promised so much, something more wonderful." So what was it that captured the jet-set star's heart? Josephine giggles and blushes. "He'll only embarrass me," she says. "He'll say it was because I said nothing". And he obliges: "It was the fantasy of the virginal girl - the smell of her satchel as I dragged her off the school bus."

Mothers and Daughters

A bear of a man, his gruff exterior hides the heart of a romantic. He sends her flowers every Friday with a card saying "I love you" and his courtship was old-fashioned (to the point where he went to see Josephine's mother, Anne. "She's nearly the same age as me. We are more like brother and sister. When I took her to dinner to ask for Josephine's hand I think she thought I was after her. I nearly ended up with the wrong woman." Anne, a widow who was battling to bring up four children alone, suddenly had to deal with the fact that her teenage daughter had fallen in love with Britain's most famous brawler. She thought it was an infatuation which would burn itself out, but it didn't. There is a grudging acknowledgement of her difficulties from Olly.

"My mother-in-law couldn't give a toss for me - provided I look after her daughter. But it couldn't have been easy to see her young daughter going off with a fat old actor who hoses down the bars as well as he hoses down the garden." But their romance has lasted and two years ago they married-Olly arriving typically late, after the chauffeur lost his way.

Although his junior in years Josephine, who has the looks of an English Meryl Streep, appears the more adult. Olly confesses that "I've never grown up - same as all thinking adults".

As our long day's drinking turned to night his mood became more changeable. At dinner in a local restaurant he flew into a rage because the Madras curry was not Madras. He hadn't ordered custard, as a group of pensioners at the next table were told several times. The chef was called - but wisely didn't show. He was later forgiven and sent a bottle of wine for the fish course, which equally clearly and repetitively won Olly's approval. Jo, used to such fuss, was ready to mother her errant son.

"Pull yourself together," she said. "Just play around with it and leave it. Why did you order it anyway? You knew you wouldn't like it." The trouble was that Olly was becoming quite serious.

Brooding and broody

"I decided a long time ago that parents, aunts, my children ... I don't think they are so bloody great, if I am honest. What matters is me and who is with me at the moment."

And what matters most for him now is that he and Josephine, after two years of marriage, should have a family together. The screen tough guy is getting broody. He had felt it particularly keenly that afternoon when the wife of a builder working at his home brought her baby to show them. Olly was captivated enough to give him a swig of his beer. The problem, he says, is that he can't have a child of his own at the moment.

"I'm too old. I'm worn out. I've run out of sperm." He doesn't want to go to a doctor on the principle that if it doesn't come naturally, it shouldn't come at all. He doesn't want "someone pulling and prodding - or looking at her. There can't be anything wrong with her, she's too young."

Perhaps he should rent her out to some younger stud, he muses wistfully, only to be reassured by Josephine that she's perfectly "happy" as she is.

The answer to the problem, Olly decides, is to adopt a child and after some discussion on whether it should be an Indian or Mexican, he plumps for a "gringo with sombrero and cheroot in mouth. I had one daughter" - and he ruffles Jo's hair - "but she's grown too old." Some people approaching their 50th birthday might balk at the disturbance having a young child around would cause, but Olly continues to wax lyrical. "It would be absolutely great. I would show it why there are rocks on the beach, the noise bees make and there would be lots of love, kisses, hugs and flowers. I would give him an education for life, give him a good start, what's wrong with that?"

A swaggering good time

He once described himself as a male chauvinist who adores women and it still rings true. Women are to admire while men are to keep company with. Olly has just had a snuggery built on to the house, which will be a den to entertain his male friends. He points out the hatch from where Josephine "can serve us the beers" and the phone from their first floor bedroom to the kitchen so he can order his breakfast. The empty bottles are left to remind her to re-stock.

In the dining room he has set up his own throne-room, complete with red velvet chair on a raised plinth, curtains and spotlights, where he'll lead the sing-song during dinner parties.

He is "terrified of growing old and finding my temple-which is my body-decaying around me. I find myself lying in bed too often listening to Radio Four and Gardener's Question Time".

As the night draws to a close his conversation rambles, but "that's the essence of thought," he says. What is more of a problem was closing the gate after returning from the restaurant.

"Oh dear, I'm swaggering," he says and, quick to find a remedy, adds: "Let's go and have a drink."