Articles/Interviews

Oliver Reed has always revelled in his role as a boozing, brawling show-off. Nothing he ever did was big enough or brash enough to satisfy his image of himself as the most outrageous man in showbiz. But he's 44 now and even he is bored with being that old hell-raiser. He talked to Robin McGibbon about his mid-life crisis and the new passion in his life

He stepped out of a jungle of neck-high thistles, a giant of a man in Wellington boots and a blue and white American football jersey. The enormous bruiser's face that launched a thousand hits in bar-room brawls around the globe, broke out into a wide, friendly smile of welcome.

With a sweep of a huge hand, he motioned towards the vast expanse of thistles, and the familiar, dark, evil-looking eyes shone with pride and pleasure.

"Allow me to announce the birth of a garden," he said, almost reverently, the voice soft and incongruously gentle when one actually took in his awesome, powerful frame.

The sun was not yet up over the rolling Surrey countryside and I had expected Oliver Reed to be still in bed in his 15th-century cottage, nursing a hangover as carefully as he has nursed his hell-raising reputation over 20 raucous, roller-coasting years.

But there was not an aspirin or beer bottle in sight. And the menacing side of the 44-year-old actor was replaced by an engaging effervescence as he showed me his dream garden and a side of him those lurid newspaper headlines have always ignored.

"I owe an enormous debt to the countryside for the peace and quiet it gives me," he said.

The rumbustious Mr. Reed, you see, would far rather chat about butterflies than bar-rooms or brawling.

The man reputed to have an unquenchable thirst for knocking down rivals as fast as he knocks down pints is more interested in planting flowers than punches. And the only person he's likely to be at war with these days is a genial, respectful gentleman by the name of Bill Dobson - his gardener.

When it comes to gardens, Bill (or Dobson, as Oliver calls him) is a traditionalist, preferring to see flowerbeds laid out neatly in a perfect, well-planned landscape. But that is the last thing Oliver wants. The hard-living actor who has, more than once, been dubbed the wild man of show business, is determined his garden will grow just like that... wild

To suggest that it does indeed look like a location for a Tarzan movie encourages those famous rubbery lips to slip into what he calls his banana-split smile. For that is precisely the point: jungles are filled with all forms of life, and this is what Oliver is striving to achieve in his most untypical English country garden.

'Birds and butterflies will have nowhere to live'

The whole rambling higgledy-piggledy expanse is, in fact, a sort of one-man protest against the space-age, profit-before-anything-else mentality that, Oliver insists passionately, is threatening the entire English countryside.

Walking over his 11 acres is an experience I wouldn't have missed for the world; even Beano, Oliver's white Great Dane - a gift from the late rock star, Keith Moon - wallowed in the freedom. Oliver paused to draw my attention to a large butterfly fluttering in the warm sunshine: "I appreciate and understand the need for farmers to make a profit, and for new roads to be built. But has anyone stopped to consider the enormous price we have to pay?"

"No-one can take his granny for a drive in the country to look at hedgerows any more, because the hedgerows are all falling to pieces, or being pulled down to make way for the farmers' machines."

"In protecting their crops, the farmers spray the hedgerows, too, which kills the fauna. Soon, the birds and the butterflies will have nowhere to live. That, in turn, will mean the chrysalis will be killed, so... no more butterflies."

Oliver has felt this way about the countryside since he was very young. But it is only in the last three years he has had the inclination - and the money to do something about it. He had been living in hotel rooms and working in stuffy studios, hardly ever having any idea what the weather outside was really like.

"I'd spend months away, always meeting new friends, then saying goodbye to them, catching up with old friends, then saying goodbye to them, and then I'd come home to find the dog barking at me because he didn't know me, the cat running away, my girlfriends off with new boyfriends and the only people keen to speak with me were my ex-wives."

"I had all the trappings of success - all the things you'd expect a famous movie star to have. My house, Broome Hall, in Sussex, had 60 rooms, exquisitely-manicured lawns and ornamented rose gardens, and it was all success had led me to believe was right for me."

"I would throw enormous parties, for as many as 200 people, in that house, then find myself running away to a tiny room away from everybody, simply to be on my own. Suddenly, it dawned on me that I was getting caught in a trap. I wasn't enjoying life much."

"I decided I had to get out of that sort of life. I had to get off the escalator. De-escalate, as I called it."

"There were things in life that weren't important and, much as I loved that house, it was far too big for me. To support it, and all the staff, it hit me that I would have to live as a tax exile in another country - a country I didn't like. And I didn't want that. I love England. My boozers are here. And my friends."

"I had to de-escalate for my own sanity. So I sacked my public relations people, stopped my Press cuttings service, and vowed to make myself less accessible to people who were a drain on me."

"I was conscious of moving into my middle forties and it became terribly important to put some of the more silly antics behind me and grow old gracefully. I bought this beautiful cottage not far from Dorking, organised some major extension work . . . and got going on the garden."

Oliver sprawled out alongside Beano, and looked at me intently, as if searching for signs that I might think him mad for casting aside a lifestyle millions would envy.

There was nothing like love, I ventured cautiously, to turn one's whole life upside down. Had his much publicised romance with 18-year-old Josephine Burge got anything to do with his sudden desire to raise less hell around the place? After all, this "de-escalation" did happen around the time he met her.

The banana-split smile slipped across Oliver's face again. "Yes," he admitted, "Josephine does have a lot to do with my peace of mind these days. You see, women that I have been involved with in the past always had the need to bustle. They were always demanding something of me. But Josephine doesn't expect anything. She was brought up in the country and doesn't know any different. She's happy just bumbling around in a pair of wellies."

"Everything we do together is an adventure. I don't have to prove anything. And I don't feel the need to show off."

"Maybe she will change as she gets older. Maybe she will fall in love with Rossano Brazzi and he will feed her champagne, which she doesn't care for anyway. I don't know. I'm prepared for it, though, and God bless her ... I hope she has a happy life."

"But me. I'm not changing. Not the pattern of my life anyway. I'm a creature of habit. All right, I admit I'm changing my attitudes but the actual pattern is subject to myself, not to the demands of other people."

This was one of the reasons, said Oliver, that he decided to take some time off from filming. He has not worked since the end of the winter, though work on his new film, Revolver, starts soon. Meanwhile he's been spending the time watching his garden grow... with the odd visit to the local pub and lawn-mower race meeting thrown in.

So just how does an internationally-renowned movie star, who knows more about hotel beds than the floral kind, actually start to build his own dream garden?

Oliver said: "I was like a painter with a blank canvas; I had to start somewhere, I had to pick a colour. So I chose green - nature's colour."

"Have you ever wondered why surgeons in operating theatres always seem to be dressed in green smocks and masks? I'm sure it's because green is so restful on the eye. "After I'd got my green - and I made sure I got lots of it - I concentrated on giving the garden lots of different colour."

"I bought a whole load of wild seeds, and flung them all around. Then Dobson and I went round the market gardens buying anything that took our fancy."

"It wasn't long before my canvas started to take shape. And this is when Dobson and I started quibbling. I like the idea of big flowers growing right in amongst the grass. But the grass is so long, the flowers get choked."

"I've had to compromise and allow Dobson to cut out some flower-beds in the clay. But he won't get his own way much. I'm looking for plants that will survive and grow above the grass."

"Being a beginner, I don't know the names of most of the flowers we're planting. But I do know what I like. It's rather like music: you know a beautiful symphony, but you don't know its name or the composer. I've always dreamed of having a garden like this since the marvellous days I used to spend my granny's garden. She grew lupins and hollyhocks and longed to grow them myself."

"But I always seemed to be living in maisonettes, or out of the country, and was never able to anything about it. I could have at Broome Hall, of course, but everything was so organised and regimented there and such flowers would have been out of place."

Eleven-acre gardens, however wild and uninhibited, do not come cheap and, so far, in just three years Oliver has spent around �20,000 on getting the garden the way he wants.

"It's worth every penny," he said proudly. "With such a vast area to play with, it's no good me buying a dozen bulbs - they wouldn't make any impression. I've got to buy them by the sack! I never read books, but I love watching gardening programmes on telly. Not that they're much good as far as learning the names of flowers. For a start, they always give the Latin names -and, secondly, I suffer from a fairly high degree of dyslexia, which means I would never get the spelling right."

Suddenly, the mid-morning stillness was shattered yet again by the eighth jet of the morning, roaring low over the restful greenery of the Surrey hills.

'Planes disturb the tranquillity, don't you think?'

Oliver creased his face in annoyance and raised his voice above the din. "Gatwick. The Costa Brava route. Disturbs the tranquillity, don't you think? Still, one can't have everything, I suppose."

He pointed over the five-feet thistles. "I've planted some trees there at �100 a time. They'll form a spinney."

The mischievous, almost evil glint we saw in The Devils came into his eye.

"The city gents who come down here dressed in khaki, toting guns, won't be too pleased about that."

Protecting the pheasant is yet another gentle side of Oliver's nature-loving character.

"The hunter's come with dogs, of course, and I can't keep them off my land because it is well known that I'm breeding mallard ducks. But I have made it perfectly clear, in the most respectful, polite terms, that I do not like dogs on my land looking for pheasant."

Yet again his reasonableness didn't fit the picture of an easily-upset hell-raiser. Nor was it in keeping with the person a local restaurateur claims she has barred for bending her cutlery and eating her flowers during a couple of roisterous evenings.

But then, as Oliver confesses, he has de-escalated.

Put another way, he has decided that the only wild living within the Reed household in future will be in his garden.