Articles/Interviews

Too early for the vogue of rugged anti-heroes, too late for the old star system into which he more naturally fits, Oliver Reed has for the last ten years been battling against his villainous looks to escape typecasting as teddy boys, thugs and Hammer monsters. Now, at 31, he is finally growing into the roles he needs to extend him fully as an actor. PETER MATTHEWS talked to Oliver Reed about his progress and about his latest films, which include Ken Russell?s adaptation of D H Lawrence?s Women in Love, which promises to be a revolutionary piece of film-making and to test the liberality of the censor to the limit.

?I had the misfortune to look like a prizefighter and speak like a public schoolboy. When I started, the only jobs I got were as teddy boys in leather jackets who whipped old ladies around the head with a bicycle chain and stole their handbags.? After 10 years of carefully plotted progress, Oliver Reed is now an international star with more than 20 films to his credit. ?I?m more confident now and I?m financially independent. I have a bigger house and a bigger car. One does change, of course. I?m a harder person, but I?ve spent a lot of time getting where I am. It?s a pity more people don?t have that time to get used to wealth and adulation.?

Oliver had played minute parts in films like The Angry Silence and The League of Gentlemen before Hammer put him under contract for a series of horror films which, though he looks back on them now with mixed feelings, Oliver acknowledges as a valuable testing ground while he was learning the business of becoming a film actor. The first of these was Curse of the Werewolf in which his eyes and his voice, his two most instantly identifiable features were almost totally disguised. ?Over the credit titles of the film you see eyes streaming with tears. That was run as a test to see whether or not I could wear the contact lenses they wanted: the tears were caused by the fact that I couldn?t, but they used it in the film anyway. My voice was hindered by the fact that I had a mouthful of false teeth on top of my own, and it is very difficult to be charming under those circumstances. I don?t take credit for either my eyes or my voice: I was born with them and I haven?t worked particularly hard on either. If I continue drinking beer, I suppose I could ruin them both.?

It took him five hours every day to complete his make-up for that film. "I?d just be ready and they would shout "Lunch everybody", and I?d be left strutting around the studio covered in fur and teeth. I would slowly make my way to the restaurant and drink three pints of milk thorugh a straw, and people would shout out "There?s that well-known homosexual actor!" The same thing would happen in the evenings; everyone else would go home and I?d have to spend an hour and a half peeling the make-up off hair by hair. Sometimes I wouldn?t bother taking it off completely. It was great fun sitting in the car at traffic lights...?

He graduated from Hammer with a string of titles behind him and went straight into The System, a low-budget film made in Weymouth by Michael Winner. This was the first of a series of movies made in collaboration with Winner (including The Jokers and I?ll Never Forget What?s ?Is Name), the most recent of which was Hannibal Brooks. ?I remember Michael and I talked a lot about the way that Michael J. Pollard and I should play our parts. We settled that the rescuer should be light and airy and the rescued should be the heavy because things aren?t orderly that way. They?re only orderly in fantasy: it?s the knight in the silver armour who?s always going to the rescue, but he?s a big bore because he rescues the girl and gives her back to her father. But the man in the black cloak and the black horse takes her off and has a ball in a cave. That?s the exciting thing, so I?m not very worried that I do look like a villain.?

I HAVE BEEN ?THE MOST PROMISING BRITISH ACTOR? FOR TEN YEARS NOW

Along with Terence Stamp and David Hemmings, Oliver has done a lot to promote an adult attitude towards sex in the British cinema, but the public find it very difficult to dissociate him from the characters he plays. ?The reaction of the public in pubs and places like that is usually a pretty violent one towards me. From men, anyway. Birds, not so violent, but I can handle birds.?

It seems that, because of his screen persona, men regard him as a sexual threat. ?This is going to be even worse when my new film, Women in Love, comes out. It is not a sexually sensational film, but then D. H. Lawrence is, anyway, a very sexy writer. The visual image in terms of love scenes is very sincerely and intelligently approached.?

?Nevertheless, when you?ve taken your trousers off, you can?t suddenly start reciting amo, amas, amat and telling everyone that you read Greek, because it?s not your head they?re going to be looking at. And no matter what one says, or how intelligently you have approached a scene, the fact remains that the woman hasn?t got a bra on and you are kissing her bosom. That is a fact. It is visual. It is there. So it is very difficult to dissociate, and it is a very sexual association that people have.? Does he think the cinema in Britain has reached the limit of sexual expression? ?There?s a word called pornographic. I looked it up in a dictionary once and it said "a sexual act or word formed or said in front of unwilling parties". In other words they mean to say that if I took my trousers off in front of a girl and she objected, that would be pornographic. But if she didn?t object, that wouldn?t be pornographic, even though the Church Council might say it was. I think there is a demand for certain types of film. It?s exactly the same in Soho: there?s a demand for strip-clubs, there?s a demand for the tit-teaser film clubs, and that demand will be fulfilled.?

?If you are going to see a film like Women in Love, you are obviously going to know from publicity, from handouts and from the stills outside that this is probably going to be a slightly revolutionary film inasmuch as you are either going to see two men wrestling naked or you are going to see a certain amount of nudity. You can?t then go in there, eat your Mars bar and come out saying "I?m disgusted". I don?t think we have yet gone as far as we can. In any case, I don?t think taking one?s trousers off is a particularly sensational thing.?

For Women in Love Oliver reduced from 14� to 13 stone: this he attributes to personal vanity (?If one isn?t very well hung anyway, it?s no good having a big paunch as well?) although his weight has sometimes needed to fluctuate from film to film. ?I often dash off to these health hydro things and drink hot water. You?re so weak after five days that you can?t take advantage of the attractive grounds they advertise so freely. I can put on and take off weight easily. Anyway, there are enough people walking down the Kings Road in waspy jumpers and chiffon scarves and popinjay blue knickers for anybody. I think when you look at the real actors like Brando, who didn?t give a fit whether he got fat or not, and Steiger, you see that if people really care that much, they?re caring too much about themselves and not what they?re trying to achieve as actors.?

Does he regret the loss of actor appeal and the golden days of Hollywood? ?No, in those days nobody had any alternative entertainment. The magic and mystique of Hollywood, the icing sugar world with actors going around in smart suits with cologne on their faces - well, that was a sort of luxury, wasn?t it? I mean, how many people in this country, for instance, had television 20 years ago? How many discotheques were there? How many people were in full employment even, say 30 years ago? One was going through a great deal of trouble then, and then the war came along and killed the people off. And then they decided that they were never again going to be subjected to such poverty. They demanded that something should take place, and along with that something came more cinemas, more refrigerators, more televisions, more cars. They used to get a degree of excitement out of seeing an actor walking down the street: now they can go to any discotheque and see all the actors and the pop groups jiving about. So I think a lot of the mystique?s gone, and it is the responsibility of everyone in this business (and it is a business) to stimulate this again. It?s coming about in an off-beat way with people like McQueen and Coburn and Marvin. They?re very much of the people, they?ve faces of the people. The involvement is no longer one of "There is Jesus Christ, he?s an actor" but of "That could be me, because he looks like me."?

THERE ARE ENOUGH PEOPLE WALKING UP AND DOWN THE KINGS ROAD IN WASPY JUMPERS AND CHIFFON SCARVES AND POPINJAY BLUE KINCKERS FOR ANAYBODY

Oliver has never worked in Hollywood. Why? ?As long as we make exciting films here, there is no real need to go to Hollywood. For commercial reasons the Americans have decided (or have decided, in the past) to spend a lot of money in Europe on films. They might be going back now, because things are getting so expensive: people caught on to the sort of money they could be earning. But the marvellous thing about Oliver! is that we now have at Shepperton Studios the facilities to accomodate a very big musical. We never had this before, and I think Oliver! has proven that we can make musicals in this country. I just want to make movies, and modern actors have to be prepared to sacrifice because acting is now an international business. By necessity you have to fly from one country to another: we?re going back to the old days of strolling players, but they used to have carts and now we have Boeing 707?s. That?s what acting is about and that, I suppose, is what a degree of success is about. So I have no desire to rush off to Hollywood just because of what Hollywood is supposed to represent.?

He did once make a film in Canada, The Trap, a somewhat underrated movie in which Oliver played a sullen, brutish trapper who bought a young mute girl (Rita Tushingham) for a wife. It is one of Oliver?s personal favourites. ?A marvellous film and very tough to make. It?s the first time I?d ever come into contact with Indians. In actual fact a very drunken Indian once said to me "White man taught the Indian to drink so now he must pay the price." He wanted to scalp me, but he was hit on the back of the head with a stool by a rather large Canadian called Moose. I didn?t see him again until they gave a dance. It was rather sad in a way, because they were all jiving about in sweat-shirts and jeans, except for a few marvellous old ladies in buckskins and feathers. And it was there that I saw this same young man, with a rather large bruise on his head, pretending to be an eagle. Still pissed.?

?We told one of the crew while we were there that he could get a very beautiful Indian squaw for a packet of salt and some beads. So, sure enough, he got the salt and beads and we drove him to the trading post and went away and left him there. It was a three hour walk back to the hotel and it was snowing, but of course he turned up about three hours later minus a squaw, with a rather damp packet of salt, and the beads he had lost.?

The Trap was the culmination of Oliver?s tough-guy roles. From then on, he was able to tackle sophisticated comedy in films like The Jokers and The Assassination Bureau, a change brought about by his ?art period?. ?I did the lives of Rossetti and Debussy on television for Ken Russell? (Russell remains one of Oliver?s favourite directors: he made Women in Love with him and signed for The Shuttered Room at a time when Russell was supposed to direct it.) ?The television films were the first time anyone had seen me walking around dreaming and picking up feathers and kissing dogs and stroking babies. They suddenly thought "My goodness, he?s probably got a soul" whereas I?d probably been singing Negro spirituals on Wimbledon Common for years, and nobody cared about my soul then.?

Does he have any regrets about his career or any remaining ambitions? ?Thank God one has a natural inborn facility for forgetting. I constantly forget, because I constantly change my mind. People interview me and they say "In 1962 it said in the Dandy comic that you like Chinese food". Well, that?s fine, until you get sick on a prawn budgie, or whatever they call it. You say something and you are held responsible for it. I always qualify everything by saying "I?ll change my mind in five minutes". I shout it at interviewers as they drive away in their cabs, and they get paranoiac about it. There are journalists, of course, who are out to crucify you. I haven?t met them yet: I?d love to because I think I could handle them. I get on quite well with people on the whole, but you could-make a mistake, I suppose - give an interview and then they?d go away and write a load of nasty stuff. But then I would . . . blow their house up, I think.?

?As for the future, I?ve just finished a film for Jonathan Miller called Take a Girl Like You, which I did straight after Women in Love, and I?m going to France to make a film with Samantha Eggar called Lady in a Car. I think I would like to set up my own production company, maybe next year. I also want to try and help younger people, because I remember what it was like for me. I have a man working downstairs now, composing music. I?m not paying him, but he?s been here for three months and he doesn?t have to worry about bills any more, just sit down and write music. I should like to do more of that and, if permits allow, get young people from all over the world and put them in something that one hopes is going to be commercial as well. That is an ambition, to produce rather than direct.?

?I was thinking the other day, I suppose actors are always worried that someone else is going to come along, but the advantage of getting older (I?m 31 now and I?ve been at it since I was 21) is that you can?t suddenly find a 31 year-old actor. He has to be 31 and to have been around for a while. But you can always suddenly find a talented 18 year-old. So the older one gets, the less worry one has. When I started I could only play young toughs: now I play fathers and uncles and airline pilots. ?And this is why I?m so confident about life. The parts one plays get more interesting as one gets older, and it?s probably the same in the life, too. Young people today are full of hurry-up. I think that?s good, because that?s when you?re having it tough and, as an animal, it?s the only way you can survive.?