Articles/Interviews

Talks to Susan d'Arcy

There's no half measures about Oliver Reed. People don't ever react to him in a lukewarm way: you either love him, or hate him. Over the years his reputation - as a lover, as a hellraiser, and as an actor - has increased formidably. Thanks largely to the influence of two directors - Ken Russell and Michael Winner - and the skilful manipulation of his image, Oliver Reed is one of a mere handful of British actors who has a universal following. He is controversial, he has opinions on practically every subject and voices them with fluency and frequency. And yet he remains an enigma. Untameable!

In Spain recently while he was making The Three Musketeers Oliver was asked to leave his hotel and was arrested after a brawl in a restaurant.

Were the reports exaggerated? I asked him while we sat on the lawn of his magnificent country home in Surrey. "No, not really," he replied. "Five policemen, five boys dressed as policemen, came along when I whacked one or two people and they arrested me. I was asked to leave the hotel. I didn't get dragged out screaming I'm Athos of the Three Musketeers, but I told the fellows that I was true blue, but they'd heard that before."

He was accidentally stabbed through the hand with a rapier during a fight scene for the film and was in hospital for four days with blood poisoning. When he returned to England, he slipped a disc while lifting an anvil in a competition. The rumour went out that he slipped a disc while testing the weight of two bunny girls at the Playboy Club. That's the sort of artistic license which grows around Oliver. A grain of truth, a little exaggeration, a quote from Oliver.

It's almost impossible to believe all you read about Oliver Reed: his appetite for the full, rich life is so firmly rooted in a Restoration-like appreciation of excess, that his adventures read like a bawdy novel which is 'not quite naice' but utterly compelling. He is somehow automatically the actor one thinks of when you want a colourful comment on the news that a Bulgarian bake made love to 1,700 women.

"What am I supposed to say?" Oliver asks innocently. "Should I say oh, I don't really know, oh, that's a lot of people! This guy asks what I think and I say well that's quite good for a starter. So he asks whether I could do better and, of course, I say yes, I'm true blue aren't I and true blue Englishmen must be better than a Bulgarian baker. So he asks how I would set about holding a sex Olympics and I told him I'd have a team and keep score on a blackboard in the boozer. So it was all written up and then the Women's Lib people 'phone me and say how dare you, how arrogant you are."

The Oliver Reed myths and legends are legion. He now lives in this enormous country mansion near Dorking which was formerly a monastery and boasts a ludicrous number of bedrooms. The house is formidable and the job of renovating and restoring it is massive. The grounds - some 50 acres - are magnificent. Everything Oliver does creates the impression of being done on a more lavish scale than other men contemplate, and this house is just another example.

"I think one has got to have a sense of the ridiculous, I always have had but I've never been quite so ridiculous as taking on something like this. This really is ridiculous, but once I've taken it on I'm going to beat it. When I have, I might say right, now I'll go and find a small cottage," he says.

Oliver admits very much to being a man of impulse.

"I really don't plan things," Oliver Reed said. "I don't think I'm going to cause a stink. I cause a stink, like other people, at times, but because I'm an actor it gets publicised. But when I do cause a stink, it's quite a big one. Simple because, I suppose, I would be loud if I was a salesman, but I don't set out to do that. I mean I set out to breed horses and look at the roses, but I get led astray by some of my friends who drag me off to the pub and make me look at ladies..."

Close your eyes and Oliver Reed could be an ex-public schoolboy. Open them and he could be a labourer. That's half his appeal, the contrast between sight and sound. Sheer animal magnetism, arrogant, aggressive virility cloaked in well-bred tones. Only Oliver could appear in a T-shirt with a stencil on it of one of Thurwell's tubby little girls sitting on an equally tubby little pony, and get away with it.

He's passionately interested in conservation. "One hears about the problems of conservation, one hears about buildings falling down, but it's not until there is one falling down around you that you realise that there's a lot that has to be done. Who's going to do it? The alternative being, that if I wasn't there, then it would be in the hands of the developers.

"I've always been interested in this subject, but I've become more interested since I've been so involved in it. When I was in Wimbledon I had one horse, now I have 15 and there I was just riding my one horse, now I'm breeding from my mares. Things just seem to escalate."

Since he bought the house his avowed intention of making fewer films after his 35th birthday has been postponed. He has been working very hard: Sitting Target, Triple Echo, Dirty Weekend, Revolver, Blue Blood, The Three Musketeers - all in the last two years.

Does he think he is emerging as a more serious actor? "I think so, I think that people are beginning to think of me more seriously.

"It just so happens that I've taken my trousers off and shocked people, or I've hung on a cross and got burned and shocked people, and I have been associated with directors like Ken Russell, who is a bit arty. I think I've matured. But as you get older you don't take it so seriously. I don't take it as seriously as I did when I was young, when I thought it was a big deal to be an actor.

"Once you know that big deal has come your way, you've travelled from one side of the world to the other and you've got a house like this and a view like that, you don't really think that being an actor is such a big deal because in respect to people and travel and situations acting seems relatively unimportant.

"What should be important is something more. I would like to write or direct children's films, but I can't earn my bread that way. I have a staff of about 13 people here to look after and much as they love me they wouldn't work for me unless they were being paid, and in order to pay them I've got to carry on acting. When I have furnished the house and things are steady, when the horses are paying for themselves, then I might not make so many films and I might redirect myself."

The last time I saw Oliver was around the time that The Devils was released. The Ken Russell-Oliver Reed collaborations (Women In Love, The Devils as well as television) have bee exhausting and stimulating.

"It takes a few years for us to get over each other," Oliver said. But the time is now ripe and Oliver's next film, for his own production company will be directed by Ken Russell and made on location in and around his own residence. He describes it as the destruction and dissolution of an Army major who comes back from the war to discover that his wife had leased their home to a homosexual and the Major has to live in the gardener's cottage.

"It's a marvellous script, sensational. It's the story of a man's destruction and because he is an Army man things which wouldn't seem very important to us are terribly important to him. He doesn't know how to cope. I will draw on my army experience for the role, as I did for Triple Echo. I saw enough of those kind of characters and I stored them in the back of my mind and they'll come out. And I suppose the rest of the inspiration will be fostered by that something that Russell has which either makes me cross of makes me good. And that's something he gets from me too.

"Ken Russell came down here last Sunday and we had a fight. I have two large, double-handed swords and he nearly killed me. He tore my shirt right down to here, and I was only fighting with a small sword, from The Three Musketeers, and I said I'm going to kill you! So, he said I'm going to kill you!! All his viewfinders and his pince nez, and his silver hearts with I am allergic to aspirin on them, his Mickey Mouse shoes, his pontification about people's varicose veins that was all blown to the wind. He left here at four. He said you didn't really mean that about killing me, did you? But we were very serious at the time. But whatever it is that allows for that lunacy or sense of the ridiculous comes across in the work that we do. He's extraordinarily talented."

Michael Winner was also influential in Oliver's initial success.

"Michael had the most influence on my bank balance and Ken Russell had the most influence on the way the public viewed what I did. Until I worked with Russell people thought I was really the refugee from Hammer, the ageing teddyboy who usually walked around in a Werewolf costume."

Jackie Daryl, Oliver's amazingly tolerant, gentle girl-friend who is the mother of his beloved daughter Sarah, joined us later for a pub lunch. Oliver's women certainly put up with a lot. In this sex war Women's Lib has no place.

"I'm not keen on Women's Libbers only because I have a deep and lasting love of women and anything which in my opinion renders them less attractive I abhor. All the intellectualising, the philosophising, the attitude of 'why shouldn't we take off our bras, you male chauvinist pig'. If a woman says that I don't think my God what a wonderful woman, because what she's doing is betraying her sex. Because women should always be mysterious, and super and as they were born to be, mothers of us, children. I'm not saying that women aren't very brave and can't bear pain, or that they're thicker than men or anything, I'm just saying I wish they'd stop making themselves so damned unattractive."

Oliver Reed has earned his spurs both as an actor and as a personality. In an era when the demarcation lines between the sexes have become so blurred, it's nice to know that Olly's there, doing his bit to keep Women's Lib where he feels it belongs. And there aren't many women who'll complain about it either. Not only do I think that no one could tame Oliver Reed, I hope they never even try.