Articles/Interviews

During a career which has spanned nearly three decades, Oliver Reed's true life adventures have tended to overshadow the films in which he has appeared. Now 48, Reed has mellowed somewhat and his latest performance, in Nic Roeg's film Castaway, is possibly one of the best he has turned in.

Oliver Reed rises unsteadily from his deep leather armchair and follows a slightly deviating course across the hotel foyer in search of the Gents. As if suddenly aware of the stagger in his step, he turns and with an affable growl announces, "I'm not pissed. I'm concussed", to anyone within earshot. I smile involuntarily, assuming this is just his little joke.

It turns out he is completely serious. "You can't invent a story like this," he insists, pre-empting my scepticism, before launching into the one about how he fell and hit his head on a step, having knocked out a light bulb while trying to shift a bed into the orchid room of his Guernsey home. An angry graze on his forehead is some corroboration of this claim.

At one time or another Reed has had most of the English language's more unsavoury epithets tagged onto his name by the media, not to mention those from several other languages. Around the world he is linked with infamy and gross misdeeds rather than any acting ability, which the unfaithful still call into doubt. Most people, if challenged, would be hard pressed to name one of his films, but many would remember some drunken escapade they had read about. His life has been such an appalling litany of indiscretions and public misdemeanours that he has become a figure of myth, Falstaffian in his appetites, and a rake of epic proportions. At one time he could be positively relied upon to shed his trousers on late-night chat shows, to the feigned horror of his host and the unrestrained delight of the bleary-eyed studio audience. This may seem a rather undergraduate, even adolescent, transgression, but it never failed to scandalise polite society. All the while Reed seemed to thrive on such hypocrisy.

More recently, however, it is said that he is a changed man, a proselyte to staid domesticity as the result of the onset of middle-age and the quietening influence of his young wife Josephine, whose very shortage of years did much for Reed's rape'n'pillage image in their courting days. Doubtless he hasn't the legs for trouser-dropping these days either.

Notwithstanding this alleged conversion, the legend has seen to it that I contemplated our meeting with some trepidation. There was also the small matter of a bottle of champagne deposited over a photographer's head just days earlier, or so I was informed by the publicist for Castaway, Reed's new film. And then there was the dim recollection of a fracas with a journalist in the course of which the hapless hack sustained a broken arm.

Imagine, then, my surprise and relief to discover not the fire-breathing, cloak-swirling monster of popular repute but a benign, avuncular man with a gruff but gentle voice. His mood was expansive, his waistline more so. Glazed and anaesthetised after several large gin and tonics, he took on the air of a decaying academic. The oak-timbered hotel in genteel Dorking provided an appropriately sedate setting. Josephine was never far away, nor was his brother and business manager David, urbane and dapper, in stark contrast to Oliver's more rustic, island-dwelling, all-beard-and-sweater demeanour. I remember a feeling of disappointment.

 

Reed recently took up residence on Guernsey, although the move had nothing to do with his experiences during the making of Castaway, which is based on the Lucy Irvine autobiography covering the year she spent on a desert island after replying to a small ad in Time Out. In fact Reed nearly didn't make the film at all. The rot of disillusionment had set in. He had grown tired of the adverse press, of people trying to make punch-ups out of incidents in the orchid room. Most importantly, all the lurid unedifying comments tended to make people leery of his behaviour. He wasn't being offered the kind of work he wanted.

"I was just getting worn out. People were beginning to believe the publicity they invented. So I determined that Castaway was going to be my swansong. But when I saw the film it brightened me up. It's difficult enough at my time of life. I'm almost too young to play Prime Ministers and too old to play captains, too young for brigadier generals and in the wrong country to play Patton. But I can play this sort of part on my elbow. It's within my scope. I don't have to be screaming and shouting, climbing up and down decks all the time whipping people and punching them out."

As this comment reveals, Reed is disarmingly frank about the mediocrity of most of his films and the fact that he willingly accepts lucrative but undistinguished work purely in order to pay the bills. Castaway on the other hand, at least on paper, was something altogether more worthy and prestigious. Directed by Nicholas Roeg and scripted by Allan Scott (who also scripted Roeg's Don't Look Now) from Irvine's best-selling book, it offered two of the most coveted roles of the year. A complete newcomer to cinema, Amanda Donohoe pulled of a considerable coup by winning the Irvine part. Reed plays here desert island companion, Gerald Kingsland, whose idyllic year of sexual abandon and self-sufficiency turns into a nightmare of rejection and abstention.

"I'm a little bit pleased with this actually," says Reed of Castaway, with typical understatement. "It's given me the strength to survive a couple of job-holding films in the hope that somebody with money in his pocket will see this film and maybe another important film will come out of it."

In the meantime he'll be playing a slave trader in a film provisionally titled Dragonard, which seem likely to have him brandishing a whip and flitting from deck to deck again. "It's nothing I'd normally leap at, but if I'm going to accept things that don't pay as much in order to do something I want to do, then as a professional actor I'm going to take the job. Even Lester Piggott rode a few losers. You can't be expected to ride winners all the time, unless you're Vanessa Redgrave or Glenda Jackson, and they rush off and do the theatre. I don't think I would have that kind of discipline."

Apparently Roeg was suffering from a similar bout of professional and personal despondency during the filming of Castaway. Reed recognised in him a kindred spirit, "who thought maturely about things like whether he should go on making love to young ladies and having babies by them and marrying them (Roeg is married to American actress Theresa Russell), or whether he should put himself in debt for the rest of his life and retire with a stick. He was a real shot in the arm for me, a breath of fresh air."

"Nic is in the fortunate position of being able to make commercials and keep his head above water that way. I don't think like that, like me, he does jobs simply because they're offered to him. He'll pay the bills by making commercials but if he commits himself to a movie it'll be one he strongly believes in."

Reed says that Roeg's direction is founded on observation rather than interruption, and that the director doesn't believe in rehearsing - spontaneity is all-important. "If someone starts dictating to me, I just switch off and think about how much they're paying me. I just phone it in," he says dismissively.

He speaks in the most flattering terms of his co-star Donohoe, whose resemblance to the real Lucy Irvine is uncanny. The part is an uncommonly demanding one, not just because the film is essentially a two-hander but also because she is required to appear naked throughout. Furthermore she lacked the sort of experience her leading man had gained wrestling in the nude with Alan Bates in Ken Russell's Women In Love, let alone his fondness for disrobing during interviews.

"It's marvellous to work with an unknown actress," he says with artless enthusiasm. "I hope it does her a hell of a lot of good. Always interesting to play with young people. Not so much the men, because the whole chemical ideology with a young actor is one of antagonism - you're either playing his father or his uncle, or you're playing his rival. But with a young actress you can see how she works without the young actor's arrogance which sometimes belies what's going on underneath. There are very few actors who admit in their youth, 'I know fuck all.' A woman would never admit it either, but it's easier to spot in a woman because she's not hiding it with this 'They don't understand what I'm talking about' shit. If anybody was like that nowadays..." There is a hint of menace in his voice before he continues: "Except for that poof Penn, or whatever his name is - he hasn't fought a fella yet. He keeps going around punching defenceless photographers when they're trying to focus on him."

 

Reed's pronouncements on the young acting fraternity contain a certain irony, for in his youth he was scarcely noted for his modesty. In the early Seventies he told a New York reporter, "Do you know what I am? I'm successful. Destroy me and you destroy the British film industry. Keep me going and I'm the biggest thing you've got. I'm Mr. England." He was also much given to assessments of his irresistibility to women.

Admittedly by this time he was already and established star of sorts, and such arrogance was therefore almost obligatory. Yet fame had been an agonisingly long time in coming. His uncle, the brilliant veteran director Carol Reed, presumably had little time for nepotism since his nephew's path to celebrity was faltering to say the least. As fate would have it, however, it was the aptly named musical Oliver! (1968), directed by his uncle, which finally brought Reed to the attention of a wider audience.

He began as an extra in the late Fifties and progressed to larger, if hardly earth-moving, parts in a series of films for Hammer. They persistently and unimaginatively cast him as the baddie, even though he harboured more iconoclastic pretensions. "What I really set out to do," he enthuses, recalling those halcyon days of youthful ardour, "was to conquer the Brylcreem and the grey suit. It was very difficult to do because Jimmy Dean and Brando were doing it so well on the other side of the Atlantic. Over here they were still strongly into John Gregson and Jack Hawkins, so it was a hard one to crack. The only way I could do it was to play werewolves for Hammer until people began to take me seriously."

Curious though this strategy now sounds, it appears to have done the job. Around this time Ken Russell put Reed in a couple of television semi-documentaries about famous composers and can therefore take a large portion of the credit for extricating the aspiring actor from the rut. The two became firm friends and the three further features Reed made for Russell (Women In Love, The Devils, Tommy) were easily among the most successful and popular for both men.

However, it was another up-and-coming English director, Michael Winner, at the time confined to 'B' pictures, who gave Reed his first significant break when he cast him in The System (1964). Winner had tried to get Reed earlier but the producer Danny Angel baulked at the prospect. "He tried to get me in West Eleven but Danny Angel called Julie Christie and me 'B' picture actors. Michael's never forgotten it and more to the point, never let us forget it." Even before Russell could muscle in on the act, Winner fostered Reed's career by giving him starring roles in three further movies (The Jokers, I'll Never Forget What's 'isname, Hannibal Brooks), although any comment must be tempered by the realisation that Winner's other prot�g� of note was, and still is, Charles Bronson.

In 1967 Reed had this to say of Winner: "I think Michael has a reputation for being difficult. I like him because he's very honest and there's nothing phoney about him. As long as you're honest and straightforward and don't cower around I've always found he's OK. I've worked with him three times and had no trouble. We've always got on very well. Michael and I joke around a lot because he's got a good sense of humour. Behind Winner's megaphone, voice, cigar and chair there beats a heart of gold - sort of!"

Today Reed still holds Winner in great affection but speaks cryptically of his idiosyncratic nature. "I've got a soft spot for Michael; he always be gunning for me. I understand as well as anybody his faults and, probably more than most, why he is like he is." When pressed to elaborate, Reed simply says, "That's private."

 

Reed maintains that "Winner gave me my bread and Russell gave me my art", but art was not the word on most people's lips when Women In Love (1969) and The Devils (1972)were released. The world was far from ready for the sexual candour of the former and the supposedly heretical prurience of the latter. The critic Alexander Walker vilified The Devils in The Standard, seizing on one scene in which Reed, a priest accused of sorcery, is castrated (off-camera) and burned (on-camera), and earned himself a cuff around the ear with a rolled up newspaper from the director. But critics everywhere were eloquent in their condemnations. Leslie Halliwell called it "a pointless pantomime for misogynists," while Stanley Kauffman, giving the American view of things, saw the film as a "farrago of witless exhibitionism."

Quite what Russell had in mind is open to speculation, but for Reed the vituperative carps of the press were like "water of a duck's back. I remember noticing the gleam in Russell's eye while everybody was working away on the set, so I knew something good was going on. What they said afterwards was totally incredible. We were regarded as pornographers in Italy. We'd have been arrested if we'd gone there. We ended up getting the Silver Mask, which is their equivalent of the Oscar, because they changed the law after the Venice Film Festival and then re-released Women In Love. There was a stage in Italy when I couldn't cross the road without people applauding." Reed remained in Italy for some time, living the life of a film star, and made five films back-to-back. He concedes that none of them was exactly career-enhancing.

Before long he was back working with Russell on Tommy, duly befriending a fellow misfit, The Who's Keith Moon, who later took his own life. "Can you imagine having to deal with Moon when he was really coming down? It was quite an amazing thing to watch. He was a natural, would have been a wonderful actor - what a waste. I felt, like a lot other people did, that when I was working very hard and he was phoning up from Los Angeles, maybe I didn't spend enough time talking to him. Maybe there were things he was barking about that I wasn't listening to because I was tired or had to get up."

"I think he just wanted somebody to cuddle him very hard. And with all those friends, all the pop glamour and sycophancy that went along with it, there were too many clappers and yes men, otherwise he wouldn't have charged off and pretended to commit suicide. What he was looking for was his girl to come back and find him again, I mean, he used to do it - sticking his head in the oven and slicing his wrists now and again. Four times. He'd always blame it on glasses breaking or whatever. Nevertheless, amazing talent. Miss him dearly still."

"I remember exactly where I was when it happened, in the South of France. Somebody came up to me and handed me a newspaper and there it was. I remember climbing a long flight of stairs to a hotel and eating too much strawberry flan, chased by too many brandies. And I remember walking down those sticky steps the next morning. I've been back twice since - never walked those steps or had one of those strawberry flans."

Reed states that his own hell-raising image was originally a deliberate attempt to get noticed. "If in doubt, hit him" was apparently the governing tenet of his life. "In those days I couldn't give a monkey's toss about anybody," he says, while admitting that he seemed to get hit more than do the hitting. Remorse did not figure in his vocabulary. Such feelings only intruded when, at the age of thirty he began to get hangovers. "I though I had concussion, strangely enough," he recalls, still seemingly vexed by the memory, "because everything went all funny. I went to the doctor but it turned out to be my very first hangover. And that's how I know that this (he points to the graze on his forehead) is concussion."

I ask, perhaps ill-advisedly, if he has ever considered himself an alcoholic. He says not, claiming he's no longer a heavy drinker. "In the end one gets frightened of hangovers. If they terrify you enough then you begin to cool it. If I ever thought that I was constantly offensive to my friends without meaning to be then I think I would admit that I had a drink problem."

 

If I have given the impression that the erstwhile raging bull of British cinema is a fully reformed character, then I have misled you. Just recently Des O'Connor, live on television, asked him where his famous tattoo was located. What on earth did he expect? "On my cock," Reed snarled.

Nevertheless, Reed's pursuits have become rather more sedate. "In Barbados I drew some characters in a book and they began to monopolise my thinking, probably because I was smoking some good shit at the time. I started to draw them in different ways and then I started to invent stories about them." He hopes that his professional future lies in these cartoons . Certainly, the future lies in Guernsey. "It's very peaceful; bit straight, bit puritanical, but then I don't mind that at my age. I don't want to go around blowing hooters up people's arses anymore." And with that he gives a bellow of laughter as if to say there's life in the old hooter yet.