Articles/Interviews

"I'LL PUT my plonker on the table if you don't give me my mushy peas."

It was with this memorable, if faintly surreal, statement of intent that Oliver Reed launched into his infamous "nation-shocking" appearance on Channel 4's After Dark on January 28, 1991. During the high-brow discussion on male violence, he tossed off such casual pearls of wisdom as "No bullshit. It's all down to whether she wants to get shafted" and "A woman will never ever forgive a man if he fucks her" and triumphantly, upon returning from the lavatory, "I've had a slash!"

Prior to the programme going on air, Reed had burst into the dressing room of a journalist who was due to appear and challenged him to a fist-fight (believing him to be a member of the SAS) and then flushed his own head in the lavatory bowl.

During the show, he dismissed a Canadian anthropologist's comments saying, "What do you know, sitting there, covered in dandruff?" and enquired of a prominent psychiatrist, "Are you a Jew? You speak like a Jew."

But his crowning glory came when he grabbed Kate Millet, feminist author of the best seller Sexual Politics - whom Reed had been referring to all evening as "Big Tits" - and kissed her passionately on the cheek.

Was Oliver Reed drunk? Or was he merely playing the drunk?

And when Des O'Connor asked him cheekily in a spontaneous moment, "Don't you have a tattoo on a rather kind of private part of your anatomy, Ollie?" and Reed grumpily slurred, "Yes - on my cock, " was he as plastered as he seemed or was he merely being outrageous to order?

And when, on Sky News, he pointed the female presenter and incoherent mumbled, "I want to make love to Red," was he really that far gone?

And when, last month, The Word invited him on to the show and "secretly" filmed him in his dressing room, were they pulling a fast one or being used as a prop in his peculiar brand of performance art?

"That," says Oliver Reed, making full use of his fruity, full-bodied baritone, "is a show business secret."

 

"The public expect something of me so I provide it. It's what I do"

 

REED, more famous at 54 as a "hell raiser" than an actor, is in the fawn and brown sitting room of a rented flat in Hampton Hill awaiting my arrival. He has put on a new leather jacket with the words 'Wild One' and a snarling picture of Mickey Mouse emblazoned on the back and he is clutching a cheap acoustic guitar.

As I enter he strikes an Elvis pose, and strums the open strings with his thumb in the manner common to those who have never before handled a guitar. He studies me through his square-framed silver spectacles and waits for a reaction.

"Good morning, Mr Reed."

He bursts out laughing. "I was going to play Greensleeves for you," he apologises in that improbably plummy voice. "But, you see, I can't actually play the guitar."

And with that he shuffles off, still laughing, to the bedroom where he replaces the leather jacket with a blazer.

"That's better," he says, settling back in an armchair. "Now, what would you like to talk about? We can talk about anything you want."

This is strange, because Oliver Reed, mindful of the recent release of his awful single, a life-diminishing version of Wild Thing featuring The Troggs and Alex "Hurricane" Higgins, had previously insisted that he wanted to talk about music, with specific reference to rock'n'roll.

"Oh yes," he says. "Rock'n'roll. I am, yoo see. a rock'n'roll-or. Um." He gets a little flummoxed here and launches into his promotional spiel. "I was passing this shop in Daytona and I said, Years ago I made a record called Wild One and look at that leather jacket in the window there! It's got Wild One written on it and an evil-looking Mickey Mouse. So I said what I should really do is make a comeback in rock'n'roll with Alex Higgins and The Troggs. Because I am a rock'n'roll-or."

Tiring of this strained pretence, he calls to his wife Josephine, whom he met and married 12 years ago in a frenzy of media attention ("She's only 16!" "She has completed her 'O' levels!"). "Have you got a beer, darling?" he asks softly. She brings him a can of Pils, which he sips at tentatively. Did he, I enquire, have a heavy night last night?

"Oh no," he frowns as if the very idea were ludicrous. "I went to the pub for two pints of beer and came home and had a curry. Chicken vindaloo. It was rather delicious."

Anyway, back to rock'n'roll. What, Ollie, is your earliest rock'n'roll memory?

"When You Begin The Beguine, which was a favourite record of my father's," he says, lapping quietly at his lager. I was always banished to the attic of the farmhouse we lived in because little boys should be seen and not heard. And up in the attic I found all these old dusty records and an old wind-up gramophone. Then I was parcelled off to boarding school so I wasn't aware of music. My father would play a lot of sentimental records from affairs that he'd probably had a long time before. Those records were rather dated. I'm not saying that my father's sexual prowess wasn't fantastic but musically, I suppose, they were quite dated."

But you must have listened to some rock'n'roll at boarding school. It had, after all just been invented.

"No," he whispers theatrically. "We weren't allowed music when I was a boarder. I used to break gate sometimes and go down to Wimbledon Palais De Danse in about 1954 and listen to people like Joe Loss. At one end of the hall people used to waltz and at the other end people would jive. That was the first time I was really exposed to girls. They all had beehives. Then there were the parties in Earl's Court when you'd sneak in half a bottle of wine and put on Frank Sinatra and pretend you were a sex machine. The last school I was at was a school for dunces because I couldn't spell or add up. But . . . there was no music there either I'm afraid."

Then, in 1958, you joined the army. It must have been wall-to-wall rock'n'roll by then, surely?

"No, I'm sorry to say it wasn't," he chuckles throatily. "It was all big band music in the army. I think rock'n'roll was probably forbidden in case we became too sexually excited." What, then, O raiser of many varieties of hell, is your favourite rock'n'roll track of all time. Layla? Stairway? Anarchy?

"Greensleeves," he says after some thought, "because I think Henry VIII wrote that when he fell in love with Anne Boleyn. It's very moving because of the romance of its antiquity."

And which rockin' soundtrack would you suggest for seducing the ladies, you old drink-fuelled lunatic you?

"Nearly anything by Nat 'King' Cole."

And is there a track you put on that really gets you in a hell-raising mood before you go out and, er, raise hell?

"I don't go out any more. I really don't go out." He laughs loudly. "We don't go out, do we darling?"

"No," replies his wife, rolling her eyes long-sufferingly. "We don't, darling."

"To be honest with you," he murmurs confidentially, "I don't really like rock'n'roll. The record I play most frequently at home is Brendan Behan reciting The Quare Fellow." He turns to his wife once again. "I don't think I play a lot of music, bubby, do I?"

Josephine: "All you seem to like is Nat 'King' Cole and Barry White." Ollie: "Mmm, yes. I quite forgot Barry White. Take off that brassiere, my dear. Oh, yes. And Lady In Red. That's wonderful. Chris De Burgh. Other than that I don't really understand pop music."

Josephine: "You don't like lively music, do you?"

Ollie: "No, I'm afraid I don't, darling."

Josephine: "He can't dance. He only knows how to waltz. Well, he calls it waltzing, he sort of holds on and shuffles."

Ollie: "Talking of dancing, I met Wayne Streep the other evening."

Josephine: "Sleep, darling."

Ollie: "Sleep? Who me?"

Josephine: "No, his name's Wayne Sleep."

Ollie: "Yes, very compact fellow. And I never thought he'd be such a firebrand. Would you like a beer?"

He trundles off towards the kitchen, gets halfway and comes back with his finger in the air and a cartoon lightbulb above his head. He has remembered something.

 

"People never know if I'm going to fall down or do something outrageous."

 

"The only time that I was really exposed to rock'n'roll and people of that ilk was when I appeared in Tommy (Ken Russell's film of The Who's 'rock opera')," he smiles nostalgically. "Did you know Keith Moon? He was savagely wonderful. And he was a superb drummer. And he drummed his life out. Quite literally. "

"Oh, and I lived on Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco for a while in the late '60s. Janis Joplin and people like that were there. I had a friend that lived there and I visited him and got drawn into the experience. We used to go to dances and watch people throw psychedelic paintings on the floor and dance on them with no shoes and socks on and we smoked pot."

Did he ever take acid?

"That," he deadpans, "is another show business secret."

 

OLIVER REED was born on February 13,1938. His father was a racing correspondent, his grandfather an actor. He was dyslexic and was subsequently expelled from 15 schools. Sport was his passion and the area in which he excelled. He was, in fact, so gifted on the sports field that, as a youngster, he was apprehended by the local bobby as he walked home from a sporting awards ceremony. The fledgling athlete had so many trophies in his bag that the rozzer assumed he was a burglar and attempted to feel his collar.

After completing his National Service, Reed decided that he would become an actor. Having never been a model pupil, he circumnavigated drama school and approached film companies directly, putting himself forward as an extra.

"He would do everything feasibly possible to make sure directors knew who he was," remembers his brother Simon. "He would go out with the casting director's secretary to ensure that Oliver Reed's picture was on top of the pile. He is probably the most ambitious person I have ever come close to."

These lowly tactics paid off and he was soon getting minor speaking parts in even more minor movies. His first film role proper was in The Bulldog Breed. Never before had an actor - thick-necked and barrel-chested - been so aptly cast.

International fame arrived following what are still widely regarded as his finest moments. Reed's portrayal of Bill Sykes in his uncle Carol's Oliver! was the very personification of brooding evil. His mesmerising performance the year after as frisky mine owner Gerald Crich in Ken Russell's Women In Love remains one of the most intensely powerful that British cinema has witnessed.

And there were other brilliant roles: a silent, terrifying thug in The Shuttered Room; a mad person who takes his elephant for a walk across a mountain in Hannibal Brooks; the alarmingly hotheaded Athos in Richard Lester's Musketeer trilogy. Then there was The Assassination Bureau, The Hunting Party, The Devils and, of course, Tommy. (There was also Castaway, where he toddled about a desert island without many clothes on, but that's best forgotten). Such a rich history of filmular activity and yet Oliver Reed, the actor, is remembered for just one scene.

"Mmm, yes, the nude wrestling with Alan Bates," he smirks, more than content to discuss the fleshily controversial romp from Women In Love. "I'm quite happy that I have one scene that a lot of people remember me by. Many actors don't have any memorable scenes and aren't remembered at all . . . Do you know, they asked Alan and I whether or not we wanted a closed set before we wrestled naked and we said, Don't be so silly. What are you going to do? Light it all and line it up with us in our dressing gowns and then we take them off to shoot the scene and everybody has to piss off? It's ridiculous."

Is it true what Ken Russell said: that there had been some manual stimulation - prior to shooting the scene - to enlarge your reputation, so to speak?

"Yes, that's true," he says solemnly, then roars with laughter. "There was, as you say, some manual stimulation prior to that scene. It was a freezing cold day and I don't know about you but ... ha ha ha ha ... and it was six o'clock in the morning! You should try it. Get up at six on a freezing morning and throw yourself repeatedly on to a hard floor. The open fire that they had in the background didn't warm the place up at all. And we weren't sweating like you see in the film, that was cold water and glycerine. On top of being freezing, they kept pouring cold water on us! So, yes, something had to be done to temporarily increase the size of my inadequate winkle."

And later in the film, possibly by way of compensation, you got to shag Glenda Jackson MP.

"Yes, I did, " he frowns. "I worked with her, I think, four or five times but we haven't worked together for maybe 14 years now. I don't see her. I don't socialise with actors or actresses because none of them live in Guernsey and recause they spend a lot of time looking in mirrors. When they look in a shop window, they're rarely looking at the merchandise, they're studying their refections, seeing if they're still wonderful. "

Are you a vain person?

"Terribly vain. You see, acting is all about responding and you have to be constantly aware of your responses and how others are responding to you."

And did you find the Labour member for Hampstead to be a particularly "responsive" actress?

"That," he smiles inscrutably, "is yet another show business secret."

 

IT'S UNCERTAIN exactly when it happened but Oliver Reed, fine English actor, suddenly became Ollie Reed, belligerent, boorish boozer. "I suppose that happened when I stopped acting," he says sadly. "I'm really semi-retired now. I'm too old for most roles."

But Ollie, surely when we see you on After Dark and The Des O'Connor Show and The Word, being "drunk", aren't you playing a role then? Is that not acting?

"Most of it," he nods. "Most of it. Of course it is. They'd left me a bottle of vodka to drink on The Word which you wouldn't really drink, would you? Josephine took that bottle and poured it into a decanter so that's in the dining room now. Then we filled the vodka bottle up with water and I swigged that. So there was a lot of preconception about that appearance."

Does that happen a lot?

"Yes, and the press don't want to believe I'm anything else. As I said to Bob Geldof's wife yesterday morning when I was in bed with her (an appearance on The Big Breakfast), The public expect something of me, so I provide it. That's what I do."

Isn't that beneath an actor of your calibre?

"Well, lots of things are beneath me but I still do them."

Why?

"Because it interests me."

Are you a publicity seeker? "No!" he shouts, shocked. "That's why I live in Guernsey, because it's away from all that publicity. I've spent so much time in London Airport and walking up and down the streets in London with people staring at me. In Guernsey they don't stare so much. They're used to it. In the places where they're not used to it, they don't know whether my persona is going to allow me to fall down or do something outrageous, so they keep a wary eye on me. It's quite sweet."

So when you are approached by television programmes, are they expecting you to behave "outrageously"?

"Yes. They expect me to be outrageous because it makes their programme more exciting, or, if they're a journalist, it makes their copy more interesting. So it becomes my responsibility to behave as they would want me to. Then, if it's on a television show they can cope with me however they like - like on After Dark, they blacked me out."

How drunk were you on After Dark?

"That, I'm afraid, really is a show business secret. Suffice to say I was playing a caricature. It was funny, wasn't it? But the real Oliver Reed comes out when I'm working. When I'm working to a script and giving a performance. What I do in the privacy of my own life is part of the way that other people present themselves, I think, and I respond to it. For instance, if a girl throws a stone at you, you respond in a different way to if she makes eyes at you. I just respond to other people."

 

WE REPAIR to the local bar in Hampton Hill High Street. It's an absolute joy to see the expression on the landlord's face as Oliver Reed walks in. It must be like Imelda Marcos turning up at your shoe shop. But, disappointingly, over the next two hours, he drinks a pint and two halves of lager and a Coca-Cola, although he insists on buying virtually every round.

"I heard that on The Word," he whispers conspiratorially, "a lady took her trousers down."

It is true. A girl from the band L7 revealed what she later called her "beav".

"Jesus!" he whistles softly. "What sort of complaints would they get after something like that?"

Probably fewer than they got after you had used the C-word on the same show.

"Had I really?," he looks genuinely confused. 'No. Did I use the C-word? I can't say I remember that at all. Bubby, did I use the C-word? I did? Twice? Oh Jesus." We put a few pounds on the Hennessey Gold Cup in a local bookies' and watch the race on the pub television in silence, save for the occasional groan of "Caamonmison!" His horse comes in second and he buys everyone another drink and himself a third half of lager.

In his pocket he has his script for an appearance he will make later this afternoon on Noel's House Party. He holds the sheet of paper at arm's length "because I'm wearing my see-ers when I should be wearing my readers" and I tell him it's sad that an actor who was so superb in The Shuttered Room should be bothering with a cameo on a such a small-minded tea-time show.

"Yes," he sighs wistfully, "it is sad. That was a good film, wasn't it? He was a very troubled young man, that character." He stares into the middle distance and sighs. "And here I am reduced to rock'n'rolling and Santa Claus."

Tonight, he says, he'll probably stay in and watch the boxing. I ask him if he remembers drunkenly fighting a journalist and cracking two of his ribs when he visited Reed in Guernsey. He doesn't recall the incident but loves the idea of it. Then, unprompted, he says, "Josephine is currently collecting all my old films and having them transferred to video so she can watch them when I die." Oh dear, it's all got a bit maudlin.

His car arrives. He squeezes my hand and says, "I hope I haven't distressed you." Then he stands in the doorway and winks. A God-bless-mind-how-you-go wink or a ho-ho-another-successful-wind-up wink?

That, as Oliver Reed would doubtless tell you, is a show business secret.